Church Discipline

The Rock-paper-scissors of Apologetics

2012-01-18T16:04:00.004-05:00

So I tried another round of Catholic apologetics and yet again I'm discovering that the Catholic apologetic falls completely apart in the face of typical Baptist counter arguments. On the other hand I can't help but notice how quickly your more traditional Protestants, with a poorly thought out position on sola scriptura get tied in knots by the Catholic apologetic.

So I've come up with this theory based that apologetics have a big circle similar to rock-paper-scissors.

Catholic apologetics tie Calvinism in knots.
Calvinism biblically refutes Arminian credobaptists.
Arminian credobaptists doesn't let Catholic apologetics get off the ground.

Most modern Catholic apologetics came from the continent, they aren't American and don't deal with the sorts of claims that a Baptist would make. I've tried again and again to see if Catholics have refutations to basic Baptist theology and so far it appears they don't.

There really are about 5 principle arguments in Catholic apologetic.

Sola scriptura is not taught in the bible, in fact the bible teaches a historic church.
Protestants have to accept tradition on the question of canon and quite often on creed.
The Reformation failed to produce a robust orthodoxy. That is sola scriptura doesn't produce a unified belief and any basis for a true church i.e. the "there are hundreds of Protestant denominations..."
The key arguments some reformers had with the Catholic church: physical presence, Marian rites, infant baptism, special authority of bishops/pope go back very early. So the apostasy could not have been near the time of the reformation.
Church authority is non-severable, the church cannot fall into apostasy. The gates of hell shall not prevail....

To see how these arguments work consider them against a say Presbyterian. The Presbyterian wants to tie himself tightly to historic Christianity. He doesn't want to put himself in the same boat as fundamentalists, Mormons and Adventists. So he ends up having to argue all sorts of subtle and disprovable theories. He wants there to be some absolute sense in which he is Christian and a Jehovah's Witnesses is not even though the Jehovah's Witnesses is at least as committed to an accurate read of scripture. Which means he has to grant historic creeds authority, but the creeds are far later than many other doctrines and he's off to the races of slitting his own throat.

The Baptist response to those arguments is easy. In order:

References to the church in the bible only apply to a local church. There is no further entity, thus no broad ecclesiology. The only church Jesus founded was the Jerusalem church, the one church he destroyed.
Baptists reject the idea that canon comes from tradition. Rather they believe God raises up a bible for his faithful in their languages. So for example the Wulfila, the Gothic bible, doesn't have the book of Acts.
Baptists believe in a regenerate church. There will never be a broadly believed orthodoxy.
They grant that the errant theology was early, but because they aren't tied to any churches beyond the 1st century they are able to clearly look at the history and see the origins accurately. Baptists, believe that the apostasy started early, almost always by the 2nd century. The Reformation didn't reconstruct the church, the Protestant churches are just as bad, rather it created the room for further reform.
Many Baptists do believe that the Catholic church fell into a deep apostasy. They often believe in a faithful remnant existing inside or outside the church and quite often a restoration in the last 500 years.

The big difference is that the Baptist makes no claim to be in a qualitatively different situation than the Adventist or Jehovah's Witnesses; they believe themselves to be in a quantitatively different situation. Salvation comes from asking for Jesus's intercession. What exact level of understanding is needed, is unclear.

I suspect ultimately this is a short term phenomena, mostly having to do with English speakers and the internet. Most of the internet Catholics spend their time debating the internet Protestant apologists that are reformed, James White types. So this analysis may already be dead in the Spanish speaking community. In Latin America the real battle is between Pentecostalism and Western Rite Catholicism, the traditional apologetic won't work for the reasons above. Pentecostals also believe in "Landmarism-lite".

So... my question to the internet is... does anyone know what's happening in the Latin American apologetics community? What's happening in Spanish?

Sects to the Reformation

2012-01-06T08:05:00.004-05:00

This image is large and may not be laying out clearly on your browser. Try clicking on the image to see it better, and magnify if you need to. Or click on this link to download or view isolated. I had originally put this image together up to about the year 1000 for a debate on Christian origins. I got inspired to expand when I had to discuss origins of the Reformation and ideas from it. I think this is a useful reference post, and also might lead to some good discussion.

Because the reformation is so huge, I had to limit scope. At this point the chart covers the origins of the those sects that came to America from England, the English reformation and development. It doesn't include the minor dissenting sects that don't appear to have had influence on America.

Arrows are for strong influence or descent, these sects are interacting with one another and passing ideas between them just as religions today do. Coloring of the arrows is to help reduce visual complexity, and it doesn't mean anything beyond that. Where possible I've tried to include a sample work in parenthesis for each sect making it clear how I'm using the term and also demonstrating at a glance the evolution in thought. It is also for the early part, letting the chart do double duty explicating the origins of the bible.

In terms of the colors of the circles:

Salmon is for groups that are Jewish sects. They may have Christian aspects but they are not yet meaningfully Christian and are in some sense fundamentally Jewish or Samaritan.
Light Blue are proto-Christianities.
Yellow are full blown alternate Christianities, from ancient times. "Gnosticism" used in the religious sense.
Purple is for groups that I can meaningfully call Catholic, western or eastern rite.
Pink groups that broke away Catholicism. Sects that I would agree are "schismatic".
Dark Olive Green non-Christian religions.
Yellow-Green is for non-Christian groups with strong Christian influence.
Muddy Pink I'm using for Hermetic Christianity.
Dark-Brown for proto-Protestantism
Red-Brown for Protestantism
Magenta for the non-creedal sects of the Radical Reformation and their descendants
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A few things worth noting.

Christianity originated from a variety Jewish and Samaritan cults, which were not part of the mainstream nor the branch that survived.
Catholicism represents a coming together of various groups. An early partial consensus, not some sort of original revelation.
Christianity has always been highly diverse.
The elements of the Protestant Reformation are very old. In a way, the Cathari and the Beguines are the father and mother of the reformation, with Christian Humanism playing an important role. Everything develops from the 13th century combination of:

primitivism
a desire for a lay church
a theological neo-gnosticism lite

In terms of remaining issues there are two that bother me. The first is that the Catholic section is terrible. Originally the chart just covered Catholic development up to the ancient world, so I only needed a 1/2 dozen Catholic sects. This one covers Catholicism in the middle ages, so to do it justice I'd probably need over a 100 sects and the diagram would be a sea of purple with a border in the other colors. I think top priority for the next round, is a full treatment of the origins of the Eastern Sects.

The other is I'm not sure about the Ebionites and the Elkasaites. If anyone has any suggestions there about the relationship please jump in. I think I'm going to need to jump into some Dead Sea Scrolls material to work this out.

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See also:

Christian origins an earlier post this post came from.
KJVonlyism series which discusses the origins of the bible.
Chart for Trail of Blood which is the Baptist perpetuity version of the above.

How the denominations see each other

2011-10-05T17:52:00.000-05:00

Got this indirectly from Thomas the Doubter's blog, Think it is a great example of a picture is worth 1000 words.

Amanda Knox is free

2011-10-03T16:57:00.005-05:00

Wonderful wonderful news, Amanda Knox is free. I feel fantastic being able to have a purely positive post. This was an example where a popular pressure was able to create effective political change.

We've been hearing for years how we should ignore the evidence, ignore police misconduct, ignore the fabrication of evidence. But thankfully large groups of people said "no" and justice won out. Its very nice to see the good guys win for a change and I hope Amanda all the best and happiness.

I don't know if she will ever again be the joyful girl we saw pictured but the tears of joy or relief show her coming back to life. We can hope and wish it for her. To everyone I met involved in this case, you saved a life, you did good! And for Italy we can wish and hope that they use this as an opportunity to overhaul their judiciary. To make sure that judges do not again fill in holes in cases with wild conjecture and the words, "it is probable".

The court ruled today that the "crime" of the staged break in never happened. Which is clear evidence of how truly silly the original verdict was, a theory based on a minor crime whose very existence is now disproven. In Italy there are 2 levels of not guilty: reasonable doubt and proven innocent, "per non aver commesso il fatto"; and as a result of the court looking at the evidence and not speculating she met the higher burden of proven innocent on the murder charge. I'm hoping that comes from using the autopsy, the medical examiner's timeline that the first court casually dismissed because it didn't agree with Mignini's theory. The people of Italy should not have to live under a law where judges freely fabricate evidence because they can't fill in the wholes with the evidence they have.

Christian Origins

2011-08-29T05:13:00.006-05:00

This post is for historical reasons only. Please go to Sects to the Reformation, for an expanded and updated chart.

This image is large and may not be laying out clearly on your browser. Try clicking on the image to see it better, and magnify if you need to. Or click and download. I'm about to enter into a debate on Christian origins, the "one true church" debate. I put together this little diagram, which still has some definite flaws, breaking down how various groups merged to form ancient Christianities.

Arrows are for strong influence or descent, these sects are interacting with one another and passing ideas between them just as religions today do. Where possible I've tried to include a sample work in parenthesis for each sect making it clear how I'm using the term, and also letting the chart do double duty explicating the origins of the bible.

In terms of colors:
Yellow are full blown alternate Christianities.
Light Blue are proto-Christianities
Salmon is for groups that are Jewish sects. They may have Christian aspects but they are not yet meaningfully Christian and are in some sense fundamentally Jewish or Samaritan.
Purple I'm using for groups that I can meaningfully call Catholic.
Pink I'm using for groups that broke away Catholicism. Sects that I would agree are "schismatic".
Dark Olive Green I'm using for non Christian religions.
Yellow Green I'm using for non-Christian groups with strong Christian influence.

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The core argument for the Catholic apologetic is:

There was a unique historical church that had a clear hierarchy with other local churches and sects in the Early Christian world (say 30-150 CE)

The church from (A) is contiguous with the current day Catholic church (I'm being ambiguous here with respect to Wester or Eastern for flexibility).

Continuity is the key determining factor for what church one should join now.

Classically Protestants have disputed (2). That debate generally comes down to the Catholic arguing the "gates of Hell shall not prevail..." doctrine vs. the Protestant citing lots of bad stuff the Catholic did or believes. Unlike Protestant, I will grant (2). I see no evidence for a sharp breaks anytime after the early church. As this diagram implies.

(1) is very tricky to prove. I would argue the evidence we have is that pieces of proto-Christianity formed around 200 BCE and from 200 BCE-200 CE these diverse sects merged. The 2nd century debates over Montanism show most clearly that it there was a great deal of ambiguity about which churches were or were not associated with other churches; totally inconsistent with the notion of a universally accepted hierarchy

Going back further to the first century we see debates among equals. Paul is arguing in his letters against Judaizers and proto-gnostics based on scripture (the LXX) because he doesn't have access to an authoritative hierarchy.

From a Protestant perspective this diagram is to some extent supportive of the theory in Landmarkism, of Baptist perpetuity. The idea that the Baptists have always existed. Certainly for example the Sabians are a baptist sect: believers baptism, salvation by faith... Though I'm actually putting it several centuries earlier and disagreeing that they have rolled back nearly enough. Renowned English Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon described Baptist perpetuity as:

We believe that the Baptists are the original Christians. We did not commence our existence at the reformation, we were reformers before Luther and Calvin were born; we never came from the Church of Rome, for we were never in it, but we have an unbroken line up to the apostles themselves. We have always existed from the days of Christ, and our principles, sometimes veiled and forgotten, like a river which may travel under ground for a little season, have always had honest and holy adherents.

As for point (3) I see the affirmative primarily rests on sacramental authority. That is apostolic succession is mostly demanded in a situation where sacraments (in particular the eucharist / mass) need a laying on of hands (sacramental) to be valid.

I'd argue for any Protestant which has a theory of ordinances rather than sacraments (3) falls apart and this is mainly a begging the question argument for most Protestants. For those like Anglicans or Lutherans that do have a sacramental theology the question becomes is there any reason to believe other than assertion in the claim that the chain is completely unbroken for the first 1500 years but shattered in the last 500?

As an aside the diagram above was a lot of work and is still has errors, I'm reserving the right to update and make improvements; though the basic structure will remain intact.

_____

See also:

reply to Ecclesial Deism an earlier thread on this topic.
KJVonlyism series which discusses the origins of the bible.
Chart for Trail of Blood which is the Baptist perpetuity version of the above.

The concept of choice

2011-08-13T06:21:00.000-06:00

This is a discussion of choice and and causality.

Context is a debate and a conversation that you can read (here). Essentially I'm arguing for positivism and the existence of freewill, my opponent strict determinism with no free will.

Data on anti-Mormonism

2011-07-30T15:49:00.003-06:00

So I ran into some interesting data on anti-Mormonism from How Americans View Mormonism. They asked the question of why people didn't trust or support Mormons in positions of leadership 45% of Americans were able to answer that question. And there answers basically amounted to: I don't know enough about the religion and what I know I don't like, but it was all about the religion:

25% Ignorance -- Don't know enough about Mormons to trust them
9% Different Beliefs -- Non biblical beliefs.
8% Polygamy -- Belief that this practice is still widespread though secret.
6% Non Christian -- Openly don't like non Christians and don't consider Mormons Christian.
5% Fear of unknown -- People don't know enough about Mormons and thus fear them.
5% Book of Mormon -- Disapprove of making your own bible
4% Joseph Smith -- Believe he is a false prophet
4% History -- racism, polygamy....

Conversely I did an article a few years back with corresponding numbers for Evangelicals relative to people under 30s (includes Christians) and you can see the stark differences:

antihomosexual 91%
judgmental 87%
hypocritical 85%
old-fashioned 78%
too political 75%
out of touch with reality 72%
insensitive to others 70%
boring 68%

There was no complaints what-so-ever that people didn't know what Evangelicals stood for. The Mormon list is primarily defined by knowing Mormons and elsewhere on the site they comment quickly on how knowing any Mormons drops the antagonism of these issues down. Their religions doctrines seem to create opposition, and some level of fear. But other than polygamy and history there is a complete lack of stuff Mormons have done that irritates people. I was actually shocked proposition 8, or the anti-ERA position didn't show up. I think in both cases the LDS took a strong political stand and then backed off when they started picking up enemies on the left faster than they were making friends from their activism.

This contrasts strongly with evangelicals where depending how you could only a single issue of doctrine is on the list, antihomosexual. Rather everything else comes down to some variant of obnoxiousness. And the percentages are much much higher. Which is something I'd also point out to Mormons who seem intent on joining evangelicals. This looks like a perfect case of out of the frying pan into the fire.

As an aside the authors give an example of where Mormonism becomes non-understandable , which I found interesting. The claim to be the only restored church is viewed very negatively. Quite simply the vast majority of people are unable to even understand the claim that Mormons are making. Slightly rephrasing to this triple:

Christ organized a church.
Men changed it.
It has been brought back.

Brings to light the vast majority of Christians are not rejecting #3 but rather have never considered #1 before. Once the position is understand 48% agree immediately with point #1. Of that 48%, 74% agree with point #2 immediately. And that probably corresponds to a all but a few percent of non-Catholics, And then from there 1/2 the people that agree to points #1 and #2 are willing to consider the Mormon claim for #3. Once this is understood as 3 separate claims:

17% -- Maybe Mormons are right
36% -- Mormons are probably wrong
29% -- Mormons are definitely wrong
18% -- No opinion

Without the need for anything more than a 3 paragraph explanation.

Orson Pratt and alternative organizations of matter

2011-07-26T18:48:00.011-06:00

One of the things about Mormonism that is quite interesting is that it tries to address the issue of how spirit and body interact in a meaningful way. That is what is the soul. This is a key theme in Hellenism, on what basis would God communicate with man? Cessationist Evangelical Christianity has essentially abandoned this question, God communicated through people in a book and now doesn't meaningfully talk. Further in terms of soul, it officially takes the orthodox position of a bodily resurrection, while the membership more and more takes the position that such a thing is impossible and believes in a non-corporeal soul. Which immediately raises the question in light of our modern understanding of the brain: what does the soul do that the body does not do? Contemporary evangelical Christianity simply doesn't have an adequate answer to this question.

Mormonism conversely has a very different answer. It essentially adopts hylozoism, "life generates form" that spirit is another form of matter that interacts with standard matter providing an organization. God is thus expressed in laws of interaction and man's spirit is a participant component of the Godhead. Spinoza was a well known advocate of this idea with Kant having been a well known opponent. Martin Buber is probably the most recent prominent advocate. This idea fit well within Deism, which is probably where Pratt encountered it. Because of the Pantheistic overtones, most religions reject this theory and even in Mormonism it seems somewhat under developed in terms of specifics.

In modern usage there are 3 main schools of understanding regarding matter and determinism:

hylostatism The belief that the universe is deterministic, thus “static” in a four-dimensional sense, classical mechanics, which was a view Orson Pratt was attacking at the time.
hylostochastism The belief that the universe contains a fundamentally random or stochastic component, which has been proven by quantum mechanics.
hylozoism The belief that the universe contains a fundamentally alive aspect, which is was discussed above. That the structures have in some sense intent, a drive or an intelligence behind them.

For Orson Pratt addresses the key argument was the mechanism for the organization of matter. He believed that matter was capable of different types of organizations and these types of matter would have different relationships to one another. The first type of matter we know of baryon matter. These are stable hadrons, quarks bound together, organized in the way we typically think of matter organized. This is the structure you heard all your life, protons and neutrons forming a nucleus with a negative charged electrons bound to them, forming molecular bonds via. chemical reactions. This idea was just becoming understood during the period Pratt wrote on materialism. Since he's died he have a bunch of examples of differently organized matter that we know of.

Of course in theory, we could imagine a situation with a negative charged nucleus and positive charged particles bound. This is called antimatter, or anti-baryons. This is exactly the same as traditional matter but with quarks who have reverse "spin". This can be created in low energy situations because, certain types of traditional matter radioactive isotopes produce anti-matter (anti-baryon) emission during radioactive decay, which is how a PETscan works.

Additionally we have found a virtual zoo of short lived hadrons. These are combinations of quarks that are fundamentally unstable. A far far greater number of organizations of matter then we had previous thought possible. In a dimension or an environment where certain physical constants were altered our traditional forms of matter (baryons) protons, neutrons, electrons...would be unstable and these other hadrons would be stable.

More recently we have discovered dark matter. This is a type of matter that we are able to detect by gravitational lensing and other effects but doesn't seem to exhibit any chemical or nuclear properties. Because of this it;s rather difficult to study but we can construct on paper a possible candidate the neutralino, but so far mostly haven't been able to prove or disprove this model. What is interesting from Orson's perspective is if true dark matter only lightly interacts with traditional matter proving that matter can exist, can interact and can be virtually undetectable.

Another organization that is still rather speculative is dark energy. This is still theoretical and we don't have widely accepted models but it appears that dark energy exhibits a collective effect in large quantities and makes up most of the mass/energy of the universe.

So in short Orson Pratt proposed a type of organization of matter, he called spirit which is capable of some sort of reaction with baryons but isn't itself baryon. The existence of such types of organizations of matter is now proven, and it appears there are plethora of examples.

Now to end on an apologetic note, there is frequently a claim that Mormons believe God lives with his spirit children on a planet called Kolob. Dark matter passes right through planets, as does dark energy. Further a planet effects you because you have mass, and spirit matter doesn't have mass or at least not much mass, thus no gravitational effects. If it did dead bodies would weigh less than living ones. That is most of these different organizations or matter have vastly different properties a "planet" in the conventional sense would mean nothing to them, they wouldn't even "know it was there". They would be stabilized / organized by entirely different sorts of structures. So I think Mormons are absolutely correct to object.

What is interesting though is that Joseph Smith seems to have hinted at a solution in Abraham 3 where he does describe Kolob. He describes it as exhibiting properties both of a star and a planet. He also mentions one other curious property that time passes on Kolob at a rate of 1 day for every 1000 years on earth. Taking this far more literally than Joseph Smith intended gives us some intriguing possibilities:

Doing the math, sqrt(1-1/365250) yields that Kolob moves at 99.99986% of the speed of light relative to earth. Galaxies move faster from us the further away they are. If that held up we could imagine Kolob as extremely far away. But we have no evidence anything that far away exists and our theories about the size of the universe would be contradicted if it did. Though, many Mormons do believe in an inflationary multiverse and this sort of speed is fully consistent with that view.
If it were an object in the known universe just moving that fast it would have all sorts of weird properties whenever it came in contact with anything from our universe moving in sync with known galaxies. At those sorts of high energies relativistic masses are enormous for even extremely lite objects. That still wouldn't allow for unusual organizations of matter, but it would allow for what would highly unusual during "slow down".
The second possibility is this slowdown is caused by relativistic gravity, and the only place there would that much gravity is inside the event horizon of a black hole. And of course black holes are one of the areas where the rules of quantum mechanics overwhelm classical constant and all sorts of bizarre organizations of matter are possible. If we assume that Abraham really was a vision I could imagine someone in the 1840s being at a loss for how to describe events within the confines of a blackhole, somewhere between a planet and a star. If we imagine spirits to be interacting with things near the event horizon that can escape, again we get unusual organization of matter there are immense amounts of heat energy available, billions of times what's available in the core of a normal star, which produce all sorts of quantum effects this is the theory of Hawking radiation. In many ways that would meet all the criteria that Orson Pratt described.
Of course there are things like other dimensions. via super strings which have a different organization of matter, because there would be different physics constant and have the possibility of affecting baryon matter. Assuming Orson Pratt were right, this is likely the most promising.

In short the theory has held up rather well, and the idea that Mormons believe in a "planet" in the traditional sense is just unsupportable. The term is being used in the sense of the book of Abraham not in the sense of a large rock circling a sun.

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See also

Mormon metaphysics has discussed these topics old blog, new blog

Mormonism as Hermetic Christianity (part 3)

2011-07-11T17:55:00.015-06:00

This is 3rd part where I finally address Mormonism more directly for background on Hermetic Christianity: Part1 Part2. The idea that early Mormonism was Hermetic is not original to me. The best known sources on this are (and they wrote in this order):

D. Michael Quinn : Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Revised and Expanded Edition) (link to Amazon). (4 hostile reviews from BYU studies)
The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 By John L. Brooke (link to preview).
Essays: Joseph Smith: America's Hermetic Prophet, Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection by Lance S Owens.

In fact it is so blatantly obvious as to be almost indisputable: Divining Rods, Treasure Digging, and Seer Stones; Ritual Magic, Astrology, Talismans (Jupiter talisman); Magic Parchments and Occult Mentors, magic dagger (Mars dagger)....

The King Follet Discourse itself presents a thoroughly Hermetic Christianity.

The eternal nature of man
The Doctrine of heavenly councils
The Plurality of Gods
Deification of Saints (theopoiesis or theosis)
Temple ordinances
The Celestial Kingdom

Mormons often bristle at the mention of magic, "occult" and "magick" are loaded terms. Magick is used in a Christian context to be supernatural activities that the religion either doesn't believe in or doesn't support; which tautologically wouldn't apply here. Occult is generally used to mean non-Christian religious activity / form of worship, which again wouldn't apply. "Religious rite" would be a positive term. If one believes the Eucharistic celebration, baptism, efficiency of prayer, reconciliation by confession, marriage, laying of hands / conferring of holy orders, anointing the sick are all magick actives. They all rely on "as above, so below", they all assert that via. material manipulations supernatural events can be induced. Without this core belief religion is reduced to a gathering of an ethical society, so really what distinguished the Mormon church was that it was re-introducing older rites back into a mainstream faith, that is doing precisely what it had always claimed to be doing restoring the church.

It is worth pointing out that Evangelical Christianity, rejects completely the notion of sacraments instead often asserting that there rituals are merely "ordinances", demonstrations of faith that have no supernatural effects what-so-ever. They can often be quite inconsistent in this view, but not withstanding Protestantism has been moving away from even the sacramental theology of Catholicism for its entire history. Such an ideology is needless to say hostile to introductions of more religious rites, and especially claims that such rites are claimed to be efficacious. There is no getting around this core disagreement between the Mormon church and Evangelical churches, but it is worth pointing out the core disagreement would be equally strong with the Catholic church. Phillip Lee's Against the Protestant Gnostics, points out that generation by generation modern Protestants adopt point after point after point of the Gnostic positions on where they disagreed with the Orthodox. There is no question that Gnosticism and Hermeticism looked at the world in fundamentally different ways, and still do today.

The 2nd generation of Mormons extended these ideas. Orson Pratt argued that all life, including vegetable life was infused with celestial spirit. Brigham Young asserted the divinity of Adam. God himself was viewed as interacting with the universe Hermetically:

Universal Matter Is Indestructible. Matter is eternal, that is, everlasting. Whether the various forms of matter may be converted one into the other, is not definitely known. Any such conversion would, however, leave the total quantity of matter unchanged. God, the supreme Power, can not conceivably originate matter; he can only organize matter. Neither can he destroy matter. God is the Master, who, because of his great knowledge, knows how to use the elements, already existing, for the building of whatever he may have in mind. The doctrine that God made the earth or man from nothing becomes, therefore, an absurdity. The doctrine of the indestructibility of matter makes possible much theological reasoning that would be impossible without this doctrine. John Andreas Widtsoe, Rational theology as taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints

and from this comes the a Hermetic doctrine of salvation:

Self-effort, the conscious operation of will, has moved man onward to his present high degree. However, while all progress is due to self-effort, other beings of power may contribute largely to the ease of man's growth. God, standing alone, cannot conceivably possess the power that may come to him if the hosts of other advancing and increasing workers labor in harmony with him. Therefore, because of his love for his children and his desire to continue in the way of even greater growth, he proceeded to aid others in their onward progress. John Andreas Widtsoe, Rational theology as taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints

So the 2nd generation was continuing the themes of Joseph Smith's work, divinity of Adam is implied in Doctrine and Covenants 27:11; 116:1; 138:38, but made explicit in 1852. Now its interesting this is the same time that polygamy becomes institutionalized. That is, if we look at the Joseph Smith, Joseph and possibly a small number of leaders practice plural marriage, and often this involves little more than having sex with multiple woman as they continue to reside with their previous husbands. Sect leaders acting as "alpha males" and having sex with multiple female members is not out of the ordinary. Other leaders like Brigham Young are marrying widows who would be unlikely to find new husbands, essentially he seems to be primary funding and modeling a social security program.

What is out of the ordinary is the polygamy that starts in 1852, here you have 20-33% of the men in the church having 2 and quite often more wives. Humans produce male and female children in roughly equal numbers, polygamous households would create a massive shortage of marriageable women. I can see only 4 possibilities for how this would play out in practice:

There is a wide age discrepancy men and their wives, men marry late women early. The problem with this scenario is that it creates a large number of middle aged widows, who naturally do not wish to remain chaste for life and a large number of men who until their 30s are getting their sexual activity elsewhere. This is basically the situation in the high middle ages, which I described in a defense against patriarchy part 5. We see no signs of this, in fact the whole reason Joseph is marrying women is because the church is so firmly opposed to extra marital sex.
Same sort of age discrepancy as the first situation but with a small number of women with a large number of male lovers, essentially a prostitution culture. Again, given the opposition to extra marital sex this is unlikely. We have no record of anything like this.
Effective polyandry. That would be a situation where the head of household marries a woman and shares him with his sons until they are old enough to establish their own households. This is not an uncommon human sexual arrangement, for example it is the norm still in Tibet (though in this case brothers share). But, there is 0 evidence for it being the norm in 1850s Utah.
There was an over abundance of women. Given the Mormons were actively engaging in missions, if say 70+% of the recruits were female and they were losing even a small number of missionaries to apostasy, this would create a huge imbalance.

So if for a moment we assume (4) is what actually was the case, we see immediately the problem. The women recruits need to be fed and housed. One could have large numbers of women living in sort of convent setup, or amply opportunity for women to work and live alone. But given a gender imbalance new recruits might not have an opportunity to marry, and whether they did or didn't without widespread polygamy the culture would have had a large number of sexually available women, creating lots of extra marital sex. So an ethical way to handle that would by polygamy. And if you ask what sorts of women would have been attracted to a Hermetic faith, the budding Spiritualist movement comes immediately to mind. Young women from conservative backgrounds unhappy with their strict lifeless churches, would easily be drawn into the affirming Mormon faith of the 1850s. Moreover polygamy effectively creates a situation of a male head of household and a large number of women in a relationship of sisterhood, and a desire for female bonding and not the isolation of 1850s middle class America drew in a lot of the Spiritualists and drew them away from Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Anglican... churches.

So the 2nd generation of Mormon leaders had a membership that was primarily composed of either the the children of the religious radicals that had followed Joseph in Kirtland, in Zion in Nauvoo or Spiritualist female converts. Every step Brigham Young took towards Hermetic Christianity would have been met with strong approval. The goal was integration and maintaining them within the church authority, "ministrations for the salvation and exaltation of the world can only be obtained by one holding the keys of the oracles of God, as a medium through which the living can hear from the dead." (Journal of Discourses, , 1:36, 1855). Brigham Young said:

"You are right," say I. Yes, we belong to that higher order of Spiritualism; our revelations are from above, yours from beneath. This is the difference. We receive revelation from Heaven, you receive your revelations from every foul spirit that has departed this life, and gone out of bodies of robbers, murderers, highwaymen, drunkards, thieves, liars and every kind of debauched character, whose spirits are floating a round here, and searching and seeking whom they can destroy; for they are the servants of the devil, and they are permitted to come now to reveal to the people. . . . That is the difference between the two spiritual systems—yes, this is the higher order of spiritualism, to be led, governed and controlled by law, and that, too, the law of heaven that governs and controls the Gods and the angels. (Brigham Young, "The Word of Wisdom—Spiritualism," JD 13:274-83, 281)

But in the 3rd generation this completely shifts. We can see this immediate by looking at the temples. First generation temples like Nauvoo are loaded with Hermetic symbolism, the image on the left is a "sunstone" known to occultists as the symbol for Ba'al.

Second generation temples are simlarly Hermetic, Salt Lake City for examples has: Earthstones, Moonstones, Sunstones, Cloudstones, Starstones, a representation of the big dipper, clasping hands, all-seeing eye (the most fameous Hermetic symbol derived from the eye of Horus, from eye of Ra and before that the eye hieroglyph of the goddess Wadjet).

Third generation temples feature geometric shapes in a sort of toned down art deco style. The art is so de-personel except for a few details like the baptistry could be mosques.

Religiously a neo-orthodoxy starts which emphasizes the atonement of Jesus rather than traditional Mormon teachings. And moreover there is almost no progression towards Hermeticism. Mormons stop in this generation and from the 1950s outright reverse course. I suspect there are 3 reasons for this:

The church is no longer being led by religious radicals, but rather conservatives. The leaders the 1880 church are not the sort of men who would have joined with a wild young prophet in Kirtland, even missionary efforts start to fall off.
The membership is 4th generation and Mormons don't want the struggles of being outside the mainstream.
The changes in Spiritualism have made Spiritualist bad recruits and at the same time Mainline Christianity is amenable to restoration. So the church needs to emphasize its similarities with mainline Christianity.
The Spiritualism inside the church is becoming more threatening to the Mormon faith.

(1) and (2) are frequently discussed. And its important to understand the the 3rd generation of leadership was acting broadly in line with these goals:

The abolition of Christian Socialism. Mormons would no longer have a closed economy but engage the larder American economy.
A generation later Mormons would abandon the People's Party (the Mormon party in Utah) and instead become Republicans and Democrats.
Polygamy was abandoned.
Rather than wanting distance from the American government the Mormon church worked hard to address the issues preventing Utah from becoming a state.

But (3) and (4) have not been raised, and I think it gives insight into why the Mormon church is becoming more mainstream. In 1877 Helena Petrovna Blavatsky bursts onto the religious scene with the immensely popular and influential Isis Unveiled. Isis Unveiled, transformed Hermetic Christianity and the spiritual movement. Up until then the movement had seen itself as restoring a better form of Christianity, peeling off layer after layer of dead traditions that pulled one away from the simple pure message of Jesus. Blavatsky threw down the gauntlet, the picture you see to the right is not Jesus, its Dionysus from hundreds of years before Christianity emerged. As we talked about briefly in the first part, Jesus emerged from dying reborn gods: Hermes Trismegistus and Sophia. Behind them stand: Adonis, Tammuz, Amun-Mir, Attis and back another layer Horus, the son of Isis, Isis unveiled as the mother of all faiths.

The problem for restorationist Christianity is the layers are the onion. Everything is pagan if you go back far enough, religious debates are more than anything else about which pagan gods to follow in their modern forms. I suspect the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, like all Hermitic Christians, were shook by Blavatsky. I think the 3rd generation of church leaders, saw where their fellow travelers a few steps ahead had gone and lost their nerve, they began to doubt in a truly profound way Joseph Smith's vision in 1820 and where it led, and froze in their tracks. And from there started to regress slowly back to the Evangelical mainstream.

Moreover just as the dynamics of missionary activity and membership had encouraged the 2nd generation in building towards Joseph's vision the dynamics of the Isis Unveiled moved things in the opposite direction. The new Spiritualists stopped being Hermetic and became Gnostic with groups like Theosophy and Christian Science being the mainstream. Gnosticism, with its deep suspicion of any temporal leadership especially religious leadership and its profound individualism would have run counter to everything the church would desire in recruits. Spiritualists from the late 1870s on, would have been terrible missionary candidates, very difficult to integrate after their baptism. Finally, because the church had recruited heavily among Spiritualists it had deep problems in preventing this new anti-authoritarian Spiritualism from infecting the church. Quite simply the bridge no longer served its purpose.

At the same time, mainstream Christianity was itself going through a quest for Christian primitivism. What would become Liberal Christianity was fermenting in every mainstream denomination. The idea that the creeds were an artificial barrier to understanding the scriptures, was no longer a radical idea. Moreover, a critique that the bible was not the inerrant word of God, but rather an inaccurately transmitted creation of church was becoming more mainstream. Why go after a niche when the broader public was available?

The next hundred years would be a time of the LDS more and more and more integrating into the mainstream of America and trying to make the Mormon faith seem absolutely mainstream. But the membership appears to not share that goal and has held on to the revelations of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. When McConkie's Mormon Doctrine was pulled Sandra Tanner commented on the radio (link)

I believe the main reason McConkie’s “Mormon Doctrine” was taken out of print was due to its candid discussion of LDS doctrines that the church is now trying to hide. Such teachings as God once being a man, his wife–Heavenly Mother, and Jesus being the literal, physical son of God are just a few of the doctrines that are being minimized in current manuals. If the LDS Church felt “Mormon Doctrine” presented a faulty compilation of their doctrines, why haven’t they issued an authorized compendium of their beliefs? Mormons often say to me, “That’s not official doctrine” as though there was some place to look up the official teachings. Where is the official systematic theology of Mormonism?

And that leads us to where we are today. A church leadership intent on mainstreaming a radical form of Christianity. A constant tug of war between the goals of restoration of the primitive church, and a desire to acceptance. Arguably repeating the very mistakes that led to the great apostasy (see part 2 on the orignal death of Hermetic Christianity).
____

I hope this argument proves for both Evangelicals and Mormons that Hermetic Christian offers a compromise meeting the goals I set out in the first part of this essay. Now I'd like to comment on why its something Mormons should enthusiastically embrace:

Lady Gaga, the number one entertainer in the world, has built an empire on the emotional and intellectual draw of Hermetic imagery. Its not just her presentation its her content. The video for Bad Romance is a phenomenal exposition of what Mormons would call the estates of progression and atonement. Like Song of Songs it uses sex as a metaphor, for the relationship with God, which generally makes conservatives uncomfortable, though Mormons I suspect less so given a theology in which God is a father in a more literal sense. I'd challenge any Mormon to watch the video, which opens with the scratched star (link to this symbol from the DC temple), moves right on to birth in spirit vs. birth in flesh, talking in the mirror reflecting the relationship between spirit and flesh in prayer, birth in water (Eve) in innocence...her flashing the all-seeing eye and not see obvious material for a dozen sermons? What other church with millions of members and a missionary culture has a symbology tied to their theology that incorporates this symbolism? Who else can explain in a Christian context what those visuals mean? This is a slow-ball they should have been able to hit out of the park.

And this video isn't uniquely rich. Judas presents salvation where the Lady Gaga character rejects Jesus choosing Judas instead fails to be saved and becomes the Whore of Babylon in Revelations. Just about any Christian could present the theology in those verses but only the Mormon and Catholic churches have a semiotics rich enough to explore the accompanying visuals, and the Catholic church lacks a missionary culture. I'm not suggesting a theology book based on Lady Gaga for Mormons, I suspect the amount skin shown makes her a problematic source, but rather the fact that the number one musical act to come along in a long time is preaching their message and they won't take advantage is depressing.

Mormons are gong to have a culture conflict with any modern Hermetic Christianity. But putting the problems aside, we live in a a time when youth are losing all interest in churches and retention is terrible, there is one major church in the United States and possibly the world with the resources, missionary culture, understanding and theology to fill this gap, a desire to relate to God expressed Hermetically. The Mormon church has the ace of trump for the millennial generation. But as we discussed above over the last 100 years rather than embrace their Hermetic aspects the Mormon church has been losing their distinctives: these videos are the temple imagery acted out.

The Mormon church was founded by a man with no official station who used divination to arrive at new revelations and understandings of the scriptures. Was that a legitimate activity? The church still claims prophetic powers, though rarely uses them. Judaism, Islam and Orthodox Christianity all claim the time of revelation is over and now all we can do is study the existing revelations and draw meanings. Christian mysticism allows for personal insights but argues that drawing doctrinal conclusions is illegitimate. In the 21st century does the Mormon church want to be the sort of place it was in the 19th century or the sort of place the 19th century Mormons were fleeing?

Back in the 1950s there was a move within the Seventh Day Adventist church to eliminate the few remaining distinctives that prevented them from being seen as orthodox, to join the Evangelical mainstream. The book Questions on Doctrine, was a series of answers to questions that toned down Adventist beliefs, getting them to just barely qualify. In their case it was being driven by their academics who wanted to be able to speak and not just attend Evangelical conferences. The Adventist membership reacted strongly, in their mind if they had wanted to join an Evangelical church they would have. And today I still don't see 7th Day Adventists invited to Evangelical conferences as speakers, Evangelicals still detest Ellen White.

For the Mormons, they could throw out 90% of their distinctives and still not be where the Adventists were in the 1950s. Ellen White wrote commentaries about the bible, Joseph Smith wrote (translated) his own bible. Ellen White shifted the theological focus of salvation from Romans to Hebrews with its heavenly sanctuary, Brigham Young redefined heaven. The unique characteristics of the Mormon church are what make it so special. The Mormon church should play to its plentiful strengths, it should happily identify as Hermetic Christians.

_____

See also:

An article by the Maxwell institue critical of Owens research: (link)
A Catholic / Mormon dialogue on Lance Owen's paper (part1, part2)
One Eternal Round the Hermetic Vision, an article by Hugh Nibley (very well regarded Mormon theologian) on the Hermetic / Mormon comparison and connection.
A hostile but insightful article from James White where he talks about this tension (link to 1st of 10 parts)
Joseph Smith, The Gift of Seeing, a discussion about the use of seer stones
The best seller Pagan Christianity by Barna and Viola, and the house church movement show that the language or restoration, the goal is shared, the language is frequently used.
Parallel versions of the King Follet Discourse
Michael Homer Spiritualism and Mormonism: Some Thoughts on Similarities and Differences
Some original sermons on Spirit rapping from the Journal of Discourses
In the 1860s a Spiritualist faction broke off from the Mormon church, primarily over political issues called the Godbeite movement. Short introduction, detailed context.
The accusations tying Mormonism directly to demonic occult activities are common and unfounded. Here is an example of a refutation of a specific accusation, refuted by an anti-Mormon evangelical missionary, showing that the borrowing went in the reverse direction (Mormon to Wiccan not visa versa).
A discussion on booktalk, that's just started about Christ in Egypt which is sort of a modern version of Isis Unveiled.
Mormon neo-Orthodoxy Chapter 5, a discussion of the movement within Mormonism to make it compatible with Pauline theology.

C. J. Mahaney stepping down

2011-07-09T23:48:00.006-06:00

I've posted twice before regarding SGM Sovereign Grace Ministries which was a look at structural problems in their discipline process and Sovereign Grace Ministries' use of demotivational methods which was a particular abusive technique they made heavy use of which was a distinctive. The leader of SGM C. J. Mahaney is stepping down. Note on his blog, note from the board, leaked documents regarding the dispute. C.J. heads up Together for the Gospel, and is bringing in his friends from that organization to guide him during his stepping down.

I'd like to congratulate the people at the various SGM blogs: SGM Survivors, SGM Refuge, Spiritual Tyranny, Wartburg Watch, SGM Uncensored . Mahaney has been a major leader in the whole New Calvinism movement. So far the issues being discussed are internal problems regarding Mahaney creating problems with other pastors, rather than the more widespread longstanding pattern of abuse of membership. Its the authoritarian culture that's the problem, Mahaney, as dictators go is not unusually bad. Part of being a dictator is terrorizing or at least intimidating those around you, that's the job. If you don't like the behavior don't create authoritarian structures that necessitate it.

So the doctrinal and structural problems remain. But what has changed is the problems are being widely talked about on the web. When Joshua Harris rereleased Boy meets Girl the fact that 2 of the couples in his previous edition were getting divorced was public knowledge. Stories about church facilitated sexual abuses have leaked. Stories about embezzlement have leaked. Stories about wrongful terminations, ruined marriages, and how miserable so many women are in SGM have leaked. SGM is not able to act in secrecy anymore and the blogs above, and several others that were active over the last few years are responsible.

I don't have much to say other than this was an important step in people banding together to try and prevent the sorts of rampant abuses in authoritarian churches. And the offer I made to Josh Harris 3 years ago remains open. If SGM wants to start trying to build structures to stop abuses rather than to facilitate them I'd love to engage in constructive conversation.

____
See also:

Al Mohler dismisses documents regarding Mahaney and abuse.

Mormonism as Hermetic Christianity (part 2)

2011-07-07T15:40:00.004-06:00

We take up our story where part 1 ended in the middle of the 2nd century with a spectrum between Hermetic Christianity and Gnostic Christianity with Orthodox Christianity choosing between them. Gnosticism and (proto-)Catholicism fought throughout the 2nd and 3rd centuries for control of the Christian narrative. Hermetic Christianity conversely submitted to the discipline of the Church. The Church didn't persecute Hermetics within its body, the study of magick and science while mostly discouraged was not seen as a major threat. Even additional religious rites weren't seen as a major threat since the people performing them and the people receiving them identified them as part of Catholic church and submitted to the discipline of the Church on the issue of rites. That is 2nd and 3rd century Hermetic Christianity was mostly a movement within the Catholic Church, while 2nd and 3rd century Gnostic Christianity was mostly a movement alongside it.

And this friendly relationship meant that on the key points of debate in 3rd century Christianity the Catholics adopted many of the Hermetic viewpoint. Sacraments are, in keeping with Hermetic Christianity, not representations of supernatural events but rather earthly processes by which supernatural events occur, "as above so below". For a Catholic, the Eucharistic celebration involves a magick transformation of the host and eating the actual physical cracker in and of itself induces a supernatural change, "the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us." (see Mysterium Fidei, for the official doctrines). And one sees the same thing in the LDS, ordinances, their word more-or-less for sacraments, are actual requirements for exaltation (the good thing you are aiming for in the Mormon faith). And this contrasts completely with the Protestant notion that the Eucharist is an act of prayer and nothing more than a symbolic reenactment, the host/cracker does not in and of itself possess supernatural powers. Philip Lee's Against the Protestant Gnostics, has an excellent discussion of the drift in Protestant thought into essentially agreeing with Gnosticism on almost every point of dispute between Catholics and Gnostics (about 1/3rd of the book is available via. the link).

Moreover Hermeticism, Hermetic Paganism, was also on friendly terms with Catholic Christianity. Catholics began to view Hermes Trismegistus as a great Egyptian King who had lived in the time of Moses and his wisdom as important and key insights. The Hermetics preached that a proper religion should moderate between pure rationality and pure dogma, that the truth lay in-between those two extremes, was essentially an apologetic for Catholic Christianity as opposed to many of the then contemporary forms of paganism which fell on one side or the other. And so by the end of the 3rd century of any kind of distinct Hermetic Christianity was gone. Hermetic Christians had either become Hermetic leaning Catholics or Hermetic Pagans. Hermeticism itself began absorbing Christian thought because of the friendly dialogue and an offshoot form of 1/2 pagan, 1/2 Christian sect developed, Hermes Christianus which was quite often a way point between conversaion away from paganism to Christianity, a bridge religion. Hermeticism died in the 5th century, along with the rest of paganism. And if we identify Hermetic Christianity as the true Christianity, then this death and absorption of Hermetic Christianity, becomes a plausible historical defensible version of the great apostasy that matches the traditional Mormon timelines. And while it was a peaceful death one wonders if Hermetic Christianity had fought, had beaten Orthodoxy, and become the mainstream faith we would be looking at a Christianity of:

Sacramental theology especially expressed via. church / temple rituals with a magical flavor.
Legalism.
Diffuse ambiguous theology drawn from a multiplicity of conflicting sources and open acknowledgement of that rather than hiding behind dogmatic assertions.
Monotheism with an underlying polytheism.
Syncretism, an openness to multiple forms of revelation. In particular an open canon.
A desire to engage creation, to improve it, not to escape from it.
A desire to improve and develop one's self. In particular the doctrine of metempsychosis, that human soul is perfected during a series of earthly lives; essentially purgatory on earth.
The idea that salvation is not binary but a degree.

Does that not sound like Mormonism?

Between the 6th and 10th centuries there is almost no hint of Hermetic activity in any existant literature. In the early 11th century Hermeticism has a revival in the European monasteries. And in this revival we see many of the themes that will come to dominate the Enlightenment. These monks believed that because God is the author of the universe, God's makes his will known through his actions on the material universe. Because we have such clear access our primary source of revelation should be natural. In keeping with that belief that God is not silent they felt that today just as in the ancient world we can establish supernatural contact with the spirit realm and achieve revelation (prophecy in Mormonism). Dogma / revelation is a source of knowledge it is not the definition of all that is to be learned. Knowledge of science and magick grants to men new powers and thus new temptations, but these powers even if they appear intrinsically evil can be used for the good. The legend of Faust (link to plot summary), which originated around the same time, is an exploration of exactly these themes in myth. Faust takes knowledge and power from the devil, falls into temptation, but mostly tries and succeeds in doing good with the devil's assistance, and in the end is saved and the devil defeated.

These monks created a new Latin body of literature from the Greek, Coptic and Aramaic originals making a Corpus of works and collecting them. During the Renaissance collections of Hermetic works began to circulate. Before moving on to to the Renaissance and the Reformation its worth commenting that, Hermetic Christianity as the term is "officially used" does not include the folk religions, even those magical aspects, that existed alongside this rebirth in the Monasteries. Hermetic Christianity, is Egyptian and incorporates Egyptian / Hellenistic notions of magick not the kinds of Germanic magic one sees on the continent. However it would be fair to say that this folk magick was Hermetic in spirit, and perhaps Hermeticism of the highly educated monks was inspired by the folk magick coming from the last remnants of European paganism.

Hermetica is the term for any Hermetic books. A particular set of translated collections of works, called the Corpus Hermeticum, circulated widely by the end the 15th century. Alexandrian Christianity, with its mixture of ideas from Orthodox Christianity, Egyptian Paganism, Neo-Platonism, Judaism freely drawing from, contrasting and exploring these things fit with the mood of the Renaissance. All of Europe was trying to figure how to intermix their culture with ancient wisdom and here was a model.

Potentially we could have had a Hermetic reformation, but the Hermetic revival was killed off by two main things. First Isaac Casaubon showed that the Corpus Hermeticum could not possible date to the time of Moses (i.e. the still believed Christian dating for Hermes Trismegistus) but rather to 3rd century Egypt. Secondly the success of science in so many areas caused magick to go out of fashion. And by the early 17th century the Corpus as an inspiration in the mainstream was dead, the Corpus Hermeticum stopped circulating widely and became of interest primarily to scholars.

However, the Corpus was the only definitive guide to magick that existed in Europe at the time. So while no longer mainstream among European intellectuals the Corpus did remain active starting from the mid 18th century among European occultists. Those people in alchemy (supernatural transformation of materials) and theurgy (union with supernatural forces to gain, powers or insights). This existed side by side with 18th century sexual radicals who were interested in sex magick, as John Wilkes put it, "to celebrate woman in wine and adding ideas from the ancients just to make the experience more decadent". And when we talk about Christian Hermeticism today what we generally mean groups that are continuous with the 18th century occultists, and from this arises the cultural problem I alluded to the in first part of this essay. These European occultists, and from the 19th century on their American and Canadian cousins, continued to advance our knowledge of Hermetic literature and have conducted innumerable quality research projects, so today a modern student, even one not interested in magick but just history, is in their debt.

In the 19th century though the situation was quite different. Occultist studies became popular again with the middle class in Europe in 1845. And the scholarly translations began to recirculate along with a pletora of new materials that had been researched over the preceding century by the occultists. This movement exploded on the American scene as the American spiritualist movement in 1848. The Spiritualist movement was middle class in its orientation and while drawing inspiration from the literature wouldn't associate socially with libertine upper class variety. American Spiritualism in this first generation definitely identified as Christian. They saw themselves as practicing a form of the Christian faith that used supernatural means to gain revelations form the spiritual realm. The defining beliefs were:

Communication with spirits.
The ability for the soul to improve after death.
Legalism and a strong belief in personal responsibility.
Christian language though quite often over various non Orthodox theologies like Pantheism or Gnostic Christianity,
A rejection of a view of God as harsh, sending unbaptized infants to hell.
Political support for abolition and woman's rights. This often led to a rejection of traditional churches that were opposed or ambivalent on these issues.

Again, 1850s Christian Spiritualism were less radical than the 1880- variety most people are familiar with. Christian Spiritualism sought to enhance Christianity, not repudiate it. Their argument was with the Christian churches, not the Christian God. While Christian Science is a bit radical for what existed at the time it is right sort of model. But like Christian Science today, from a cultural standpoint it was a religion for Protestant woman, women mostly growing up in a Reformed tradition that were unwilling to accept a traditional role of submission and cultural isolation. This massively popular social movement lasted for 3 generations and by the time it was done had transformed every church in America. It is my contention that its influence was particularly felt by the Mormon church, that a huge number of these women in the 1850s joined the Mormon church, a church was already amenable to the ideas of Hermetic Christianity and in doing so moved the Mormon church outside the realm of Charismatic Christianity into a new distinctive form of Hermetic Christianity.

In the next section we are going to have to back two decades to the 1830s and talk about the development of the Mormon church prior to the arrival of American spiritualism. That the Mormon church was even during the Joseph Smith years leaning heavily in a Hermetic direction, that it already had most of the aspects of Hermetic Christianity already in place. And thus the Mormon church would have been amenable to the theology and attractive as a religious option for American Spiritualists. It's my contention that most of truly distinctive doctrines of the Mormon church that developed under Brigham Young, including the normalization of polygamy and the infinite regression of Gods, can be explained by this wave of converts reinforcing an already existing motif. Between 1850 and 1870 American churches were not in a growth phase in general (link) but the Mormon church grew from around 20,000 to 80,000 persons, even while experiencing persecution. So our 3rd part will concern itself with the history of the Mormon church.

Link to part3.

Mormonism as Hermetic Christianity (part 1)

2011-07-05T17:25:00.017-06:00

I have to admit to being remarkably ignorant about the Mormon religion prior to a few weeks ago. I had always viewed Mormonism as a legalistic branch of Christianity combined with a ridiculous story about Jesus having come to America to preach to American Indians. For all the exotic religions from the ancient world, from the middle ages, from the more recent past, I'd explored I never looked at a faith with 6 million modern day Americans with anything more than a passing glance because I assumed there would be nothing interesting to see. And just recently with one of those passing glances I did a double take. I ran into an internet discussion with a bunch of religious Mormons the kind that don't know what coffee tastes like and were married by 23, using authors from History of Religions in a religious debate, the sort of authors and more importantly concepts that usually only atheists or radical theologians would cite; and the Mormons showed clear signs of having read, understood and at least in some part approving of those books.

And so I was caught off guard, so I read more and more of the discussions on that board, and saw ideas from esoteric Christianity, what looked to me like ideas from Rosicrucianism, being used casually. A bunch of people who all think George W. Bush was a good president, citing religious ideas that Paul Tillich might think but would figure too radical to speak? This warranted more investigation. And after a few weeks I've come to the conclusion that Morminism is genuinely cool. A truly new American religion, a blend of ingredients I've never seen before. That would be worthy of discussion in and of itself but a month ago if you would have asked me, "what would happen if a Conservative version of Helena Blavatsky had set up a mainstream church that grew to millions and thinks it's part of Evangelical Christianity"? I would have considered the question an oxymoron, not even possible enough to warrant discussion, until I looked at Brigham Young's church. I must admit I'm still getting over the idea of KJVonlyists who are to the left of Elizabeth Johnson on re-imaging God with Holy Mother(s). If you are someone who likes this blog, and haven't looked into Mormonism, I'll stop you right here and say this is religion worth looking at. It is frankly amazing that such a thing even exists much less is a church with million and millions of members, who have been in the church for 5-7 generations plus new recruits. It is shattering many of my assumptions about what is possible.

Mormons defines itself as a close cousin of Evangelical Christianity Evangelical Christianity defines itself first and foremost in terms of adherence to Protestant doctrines. Protestantism defines itself based on: its definition of scripture, faith defined by creeds, its understanding of grace within a narrow band between Luther and Calvin, a creedal understanding of Christ, and a rejection of sacramental theology. All 5 of which are contradicted by Mormon theology, and contradicted not by a little bit, either. From an evangelical standpoint 7th day Adventists, sit on the border between Christianity and heresy; Jehovah's witnesses while Christian are preaching clear cut heresies and Mormons well is just another religion.The paradox that gets beaten to death on the web is "Is Mormon Christian?" Now the average evangelical who understands something about Mormonism usually responds with some variation of, "What are you kidding?"

Ah but... Mormonism is a very theologically tolerant religion. It takes an open view of relationship between theology and religion, we are not saved by our knowledge of biblical doctrine. Catholicism fought against the ancient alternative forms of Christianity with a: one God, one creed, one Bishop slogan. And while Protestant Christianity has rejected the "one Bishop" in their mind that requires they cling all the more tightly to "one creed". So, is it really fair to use a evangelical standard, or can we possibly come up with some sort of neutral standard? There wouldn't even be a question if Mormonism didn't identify heavily with Evangelical Christianity, but it does, and further culturally and linguistically there are a lot of similarities. It would be hard to imagine someone who didn't take the ties with Evangelical Christianity serious writing an argument or an article like the Apostle's creed and the book of Mormon. Self identification is a key criteria, so we should treat it as respectfully as possible. As an aside, the argument about the Apostle's creed IMHO ducks the key issue, most evangelicals are willing to grant that at the time the book of Mormon was authored Joseph Smith was still essentially Christian in his religious views, its the developments after that, the beliefs that are held over and beyond those which are of at this point the largest source of conflict. And this is evidenced by the fact that a more mainstream group than the LDS, a group that rejects the later revelations, The Community of Christ, joined the NCC in 2010 (link), without the later revelations there simply is not nearly the same degree of theological hurdles.

So I actually have something different to say about this never ending debate; a possible compromise on the "is Mormon Christian" debate which:

Is historically accurate and is not an abuse of language.
Is supportive of Mormon theology regarding being a restored church. It provides some genuine historical meat to what is otherwise a vague claim, making "we are the re-established, original Christian church" plausible in a genuine historical context, capable of holding up to scrutiny and scholarship.
Is respectful of the theological objections that Catholics and Protestants express towards Mormonism by openly acknowledging their "non-normative" theology.
Offers a plausible theory for how the distinctive aspects of the Mormon faith developed as quickly as they did, and why Mormonism diverged from "normative" Christianity as far as it did under Brigham Young.

What I'm proposing is that we answer the question in the affirmative, Mormonism is a form of Hermetic Christianity, a form of Christianity that coexisted in the ancient world along with Catholic Christianity, and has continued to off and on exist throughout the next two millennia. Before getting into my argument for that answer let me first qualify by saying there are a few problems with this solution.

The Mormon church is probably over ten-times the size of all the other Hermetic churches worldwide, put together. Mainline or Evangelical Christianity are big enough that the Church of Later Day Saints could be "just another denomination" if grouped with Hermetic Christianity the Mormon church would redefine the entire group.
Culturally they are not a fit. Hermetic Christianity has a 1000 year history of having essentially always been associated with political and/or sexual radicalism. Hermetic Christian churches further have a more limited ecclesiology, they aim to be an activity their members engage in, they make no attempt to form an inter-generational relationship guiding their lives.
Because of (2) above, this doesn't address the core issue in terms of ecumenical dialogue, which is I suspect the main reason Mormons want to identify as Evangelical Christians. The religions themselves travel in different circles. Hermetic Christians groups in today's world along with Gnostic Christianity, form a bridge between the left end of Liberal Christianity and Neopaganism, New Age movement, Spiritualism... Its unlikely the people in those groups know who Al Mohler or John MacArthur even are, much less have a desire for their acceptance. If evangelicals came in contact with Hermetic Churches, while the counter arguments would be different, the level of hostility would likely be almost equally high.

So a fairly good case could be made that this article is irrelevant, I'm just ducking the issue. But I think its worth a conversation as a possible compromise. So lets start with a quick discussion about what is Hermeticism and Hermetic Christianity. In the ancient world, Hermeticism was a branch of Egyptian paganism created after Alexander the Great, merging the cults of Hermes, the Greek messenger (writing) god, the source of hidden wisdom, and for later Greeks the Logos; and Thoth an Egyptian god, the only begotten son of Ra the high god, who was the teacher of man, the god of writing.
The attraction for both sides was a well developed magick (we'll adopt the Hermetic convention of using magic for a form of stagecraft involving illusion and magick for ritual activities aimed at altering the material world through supernatural means) cult in each of the respective religions. Hermeticism became an international religion, centered in Egypt, focused on creating a synthesis between Platonic philosophy and its religious offshoots with more traditional, religious forms. To left you see pictured the Hermetic symbol, the symbol of Hermes Trismegistus, their merged God which has the the Ankh of Thoth merged with the twin snakes of Hermes. For later Hellenists, Hermes Trismegistus was the Logos who had become incarnate to teach man hidden wisdoms of the high God, including the magick healing i.e. medicine. You can see the obvious derivation with today's modern symbol for medicine, pictured to the right. I'll won't focus on the obvious symbolism of the cross but will (link) and mention in the Coptic church even today you can see Ankh crosses, hybrids between the Ankh and the cross and these go back to the 1st century.

In many ways this was exactly the goal of Hellenistic Judaism, to create a merger between Jewish ritual and theology with Greek culture and philosophy. This friendly alliance between Hermitics and Hellenistic Jews was strengthened with Julius Caesar's and Mark Anthony's conquest of Egypt. Hermetics rejected Roman rule and got involved political resistance, Jews were fighting the occupation of Judea and Roman customs and laws like circumcision prohibitions; another great friendship forged based on "the enemy of my enemy". This merger is evidence in both the literature and archeology of 1st century Judaism, its from this period that we find a wealth of Jewish magical amulets all over the ancient world using Hermetic incantations modified with Jewish / Babylonian angels rather than Egyptian / Greek names. Jewish Hermeticism sought to reinterpret Hermes Trismegistus with the Logos, the divine word or message reinterpret as Torah (the first 5 books of the old testament), the Word of God in essentially modern usage. Now if we consider the Gospel of Mark for a moment

A long Jewish midrash, a religious biography of a messianic character constructed from the Septuagint.
Miracles of healing including their wording a magical character (see for example Morton's Smith, Jesus the Magician for a long discussion of magick as a theme of Mark).
An adoptionist view of Jesus, in particular a description, bird and all (Mark 1:9-11), of the Hermetic magick rite for gaining divine powers.
The idea that the God, has secrets (the Messianic secret) openly only to the select few, a motif that hadn't appeared in Judaism to this point but was common in Hermeticism.
A focus on baptism, common for Jewish baptismal cults.
The Hermetic eating the god rite, eucharist, presented in a Jewish context (Mark 14:22-26).

Hermetic Jews / proto-Christians are by far the community most likely to have authored Mark. The same relationship that Mark has to Matthew and Luke (Mack the Knife, and biblical development) is founding underlying the Gospel of John, is a Signs Gospel which presents a list of earthly miracle worker in the Jewish community as a savior (see my post Bultmann's order for John for more on the construction of the Gospel of John). A focused tie on the connection between magick and revelation of truth which could have emerged from a Hermetic Jewish / proto-Christian community.

In terms of the Epistles, we also run into some pretty clear evidence in Colossians 2:8-23:

Col 2:8, Col 2:20 manipulation of matter through spirits, secret magick rituals;
Col 2:11 circumcision, the importance of earthly acts to control powers, Hermeticism is not gnostic "as above is below" is the core idea of magick.
Col 2:16-17 special ritual holidays
Col 2:18 angel worship, a truly distinctive part of Hermetic Judaism provides the strongest evidence for the identification
Col 2:21-23 legalism, a focus on ritual purity for the laity.

The opponents in Galatians, the Judaizers, with their demand for an earthly circumcision could very easily have been Hermetic proto-Christians. Interestingly enough, Paul's own methodology, of searching through scripture for mystical revelation has a Hermetic feel but then the lack of earthly action is Gnostic. And can view Paul, a 2nd generation Christian trying to steer the church between the two extreme of Hermeticism and proto-Gnosticism. Corinthians provides a wonderful example where he seems to be confronted with a congregation unable to decide whether material things are of no importance (Gnosticism) or what is bound on earth is bound in heaven (Hermeticism). We can imagine the world of Paul, confronting a Hermetic i.e. messianic congregation which has seen its earthly expectations of redemption crushed under Roman might. Jewish / Christian Gnosticism started as a reaction against what the Jews believes was their defeated god, fake god, a god who had promised that his faithful would be redeemed and then allowed them to be humiliated and defeated. Paul's message that it was not an earthly redemption, and far from a defeat that the cross represented a heavenly triumph against the powers and principalities would have represented an appealing message. When reading the epistles you can hear Paul viewing early Christianity caught between Scylla and Charybdis, Paul moving the congregation away from both magical thinking, believing they could change the course of human history through supernatural means; and at the same time fighting the utter dispair in history and this world that Gnosticism represented. In Paul's 7 authentic epistles we can view a second generation of Hermetic Jew, his Christianity which will uphold the power of the material sacraments, codes of morality while asserting that their effects are heavenly not earthly; in effect moving his congregation from proto-Christianity to Christianity. Jude can be seen in the same light loaded with mystical references and obscure literature while still asserting the key importance of earthly events.
Hebrews presents a mythical savior as a new form of priest establishing a new type of mythical priesthood, based on a new heavenly sacrifice in his heavenly sanctuary where he acts as High Priest making ineffectual earthly sacrifices. Nope not Hermetic Judaism. Hermetic Judaism would have been an argument that earthly sacrifices are effectual because they mimic the heavenly sacrifices of the heavenly Christ in his heavenly temple, or that the earthly ones aren't close enough to actually work. Hebrews is also unavoidably early, as it predates the destruction of the temple, so this theory of origins is going to require a belief in at least one other strand of early Christianity. Revelations is traditional apocalyptic literature, that could have been written at almost anytime. Its the sort of thing Hermetic Christians might have read and taken inspiration from though its doubtful they would have created it. It could very easily have been an earlier work recast with the Christian community recasting Jesus as God's earthly redeemer. But in the Essenes we have obvious candidates for its original authors. And we both sides of this for James, an early version from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the later "Christianized" version which is canonical James. And that solution of the Essenes would work for Hebrews as well, an argument for community holiness and God's deliverance over what they saw as Herod's perverse temple. So for the purpose of believing in a unique early church we could have the Hermetic Judaism influencing the Essenes and then literature passing between those communities.

The pastoral epistles with their obvious 2nd century references, as well as most of the catholic epistles belong to a later phase; a community done migrating from Judaism, that has concerns over governance. The two main strands of Q: Greek cynical philosophy and Jewish apocalyptic traditions are not part of Hermetic Judaism. Matthew's theology would not have come from this group, though again the Essenes would work. Similarly Luke/Acts (and even the earlier form of Luke, The Gospel of the Lord) is not Hermetic Jewish either but I'd date this well in 2nd century. The reworking Signs into John, is hard to date with confidence but we can be assured its later than most other works in the New Testament. Hence, those remaining books present no contradiction to the theory.

Hermetic Judaism was even without any other influence already a fairly complete proto-Christianity. It could very well have represented the original church, the church that authored most of the bible. A plausible source for the sort of group a primitive Christianity could initially have emerged from. This sort of naturalistic framework for viewing the bible is fully in accord with Mormon tradition:

“The Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the Bible from which translations have been made, are evidently very much corrupted,…the learned are under the necessity of translating from such mutilated, imperfect, and, in very many instances, contradictory copies as still exist. This uncertainty, combined with the imperfections of uninspired translators, renders the Bibles of all languages, at the present day, emphatically the words of men, intead of the pure word of God.” (Pratt, Spiritual Gifts)

We will stop here and take up the rest of the argument in the 2nd half.

What happened to pagan Hermeticism and its collapse into Catholic Christianity, Hermes Christianus.
Hermetic Christianity, its disappearance from the ancient world and its rebirth as a religion of European aristocrats and religious radicals.
How a religion of European aristocrats might have made contact, transformed and been reborn in a middle / lower class rural American sect run by Brigham Young.

___________

See also:

part2 and part3 of this series
The ideas about Hermetic Christianity and its tie to Christian origins were first proposed by Richard Reitzenstein in Poimandres: Studien zur Griechisch-ägyptischen und frühchristlichen which unfortunately has never been translated. A good summary is found in chapter 8 of Pagan Regeneration, by Harold R. Willoughby. Also a more modern summary from lecture notes one by Vernon Robbins.
Wikipedia has a nice summary / introduction to magic from that period.
The idea that early Christians didn't in fact believe that the gospels were relating events in Palestine but viewed them mythically, like the stories of hercules, is extensively argued elsewhere. A fairly good treatment which examines references in depth is Earl Doherty's site.
Rediscovering Ancient Christianity by C Wilfred Griggs, a historically accurate approach from BYU agreeing overall with the Walter Bauer style analysis above. The article itself even goes further in addressing theorists like David Strauss who made strong negative claims about the historicity of the bible texts.
Fair LDS page on the diversity of early Christianity.
Evangelical analysis of the Colossian Heresy: part1, part2, part3

75 bible sayings

2011-06-30T19:25:00.000-06:00

Terrific little list from http://www.av1611.org/kjv/fight.html of expressions that came from the KJV

1. Genesis 4:2-5: can't get blood from a turnip
2. Genesis 7: don't miss the boat
3. Genesis 11:7-9: babbling
4. Genesis 15:5: teller
5. Genesis 43:34: mess (of food)
6. Exodus 19:16-18: holy smoke
7. Exodus 28:42: britches
8. Exodus 32:8: holy cow
9. Leviticus 2:14: roast ears
10. Leviticus 13:10: the quick (raw flesh)
11. Leviticus 14:5-6: running water
12. Leviticus 16:8: scapegoat
13. Leviticus 25:10: Liberty Bell
14. Numbers 21:5: light bread
15. Numbers 35:2-5: suburb
16. Deuteronomy 2:14: wasted him
17. Deuteronomy 24:5: cheer up
18. Deuteronomy 32:10: apple of his eye
19. Judges 5:20: star wars
20. Judges 7:5-12: under dog
21. Judges 8:16: teach a lesson
22. Judges 17:10: calling a priest father
23. I Samuel 14:12: I'll show you a thing or two
24. I Samuel 20:40: artillery
25. I Samuel 25:37: petrified
26. II Samuel 19:18: ferry boat
27. I Kings 3:7: don't know if he's coming or going
28. I Kings 14:3: cracklins
29. I Kings 14:6: that's heavy
30. I Kings 21:19-23: she's gone to the dogs
31. II Chronicles 9:6: you haven't heard half of it
32. II Chronicles 30:6: postman
33. Nehemiah 13:11: set them in their place
34. Esther 7:9: he hung himself
35. Job 11:16: It's water under the bridge
36. Job 20:6: he has his head in the clouds
37. Psalm 4:8: lay me down to sleep
38. Psalm 19:3-4: he gave me a line
39. Psalm 37:13: his day is coming
40. Psalm 58:8: pass away (dying)
41. Psalm 64:3-4: shoot off your mouth
42. Psalm 78:25: angel's food cake
43. Psalm 141:10: give him enough rope and he'll hang himself
44. Proverbs 7:22: dumb as an ox
45. Proverbs 13:24: spare the rod, spoil the child
46. Proverbs 18:6: he is asking for it
47. Proverbs 24:16: can't keep a good man down
48. Proverbs 25:14: full of hot air
49. Proverbs 30:30: king of beasts
50. Ecclesiastes 10:19: money talks
51. Ecclesiastes 10:20: a little bird told me
52. Song Solomon 2:5: lovesick
53. Isaiah 52:8: see eye to eye
54. Jeremiah 23:25: I have a dream (MLK, Jr)
55. Ezekiel 26:9: engines
56. Ezekiel 38:9: desert storm or storm troopers
57. Daniel 3:21: hose (leg wear)
58. Daniel 8:25: foreign policy
59. Daniel 11:38: the force be with you (star wars)
60. Hosea 7:8: half-baked
61. Jonah 4:10-11: can't tell left from right
62. Zephaniah 3:8-9: United Nations Assembly
63. Matthew 25:1-10: burning the midnight oil
64. Matthew 25:33: right or left side of an issue
65. Matthew 27:46: for crying out loud
66. Mark 5:13: hog wild
67. Luke 11:46: won't lift a finger to help
68. Luke 15:17: he came to himself
69. Romans 2:23: breaking the law
70. Philippians 3:2: beware of dog
71. Colossians 2:14: they nailed him
72. I John 5:11-13: get a life
73. Revelation 6:8: hell on earth
74. Revelation 16:13: a frog in my throat
75. Revelation 20:15: go jump in the lake

Don't reassure me, empower me

2011-06-27T07:41:00.000-06:00

Terrific line I ran across today which of course applies more broadly:

I make my peace with the LDS Church’s institutional sexism every day, every week, because I believe that this is where God called me to be. I’ve also been very lucky to have local leaders who understand some of the challenges that women face in the Church and try to do what they can to encourage progress.

However, here’s the thing: no man gets the right to reassure me that I’m his equal when every single outward sign of how the Church is run tells a different story.

Salt Lake City leaders, here’s a request: Stop telling me I’m incredible, and start giving me responsibility and authority befitting an adult and not a child. Stop standing up each Mother’s Day to wax on about how women are fantastically spiritual and start taking a hard look at the institutional sexism that repeatedly devalues women. (read the full article)

Objective measure of translation accuracy

2011-06-26T17:47:00.002-06:00

So I've had this idea for an accuracy test between bibles. The idea was to pick verses each of which has a different kind of complication and see how all the various bibles handle it. The complications and scoring is is thought for thought not word for word, but at the same time highly detailed so it should be fair between formal, dynamic translations and hopefully going further out in either direction. Score the various bibles form 1-5, with 2 being the "wrong answer" 4 being the "right answer" and 1 and 5 being additional penalties and bonus, and 3 being 1/2 credit. I'm going to score both translations and study bibles on how well they handle this, because there may be (and probably will be) differences between study bibles and some translation have excellent study bibles while other's don't and availability of good quality notes matters. I was going to do NT only so I can include a lot of bibles like The Voice, The Source, Gaus which don't usually get rated. I also intend to include bibles from non-Protestant groups: Catholic bibles, New World Translation (Jehovah's witnesses), Clear Word (Adventist)...

And hopefully with time:

a) Expand out to more translations
b) Expand out to more tricky aspects
c) Maybe move to a more random sample 3 of each type of issue

The idea being this gives something of an objective measure of "accuracy". Here are the types of issues and corresponding verses I was thinking about:

1 Corinthians 2:6-10 dual meaning of archons of the aion, as both heavenly demons manipulating the earth, ephemeral powers and their earthly representatives, "princes of this age". Most bibles just have this as earthly.

2 = earthly
4 = heavenly, both or ambiguos.
5 = captures the relationship between both.

2 Corinthians 12:2 "third heaven" Venus translation vs transculturation covers this one. Frequently bibles use "heaven" or "with God" and God simply doesn't live on the 3rd heaven.

1 = With God
2 = Heaven
4 = 3rd Heaven
5 = 3rd Heaven with an explanation of what the the term means.

Romans 6:8 (tense complexity and the Greek notion of time) (Bible translation: Ebonics and the aorist tense)
This is a tricky passage since the tenses are hard, particularly hard in standard English. This is a key verse of great theological importance that is tough to translate, and because it is tough to translate people often just change the underlying theology. Moreover the Greek notion of timelessness isn't really part of American / Christian culture so there is a temptation to consider what Paul is considering an act that takes place in eternity to have taken place at a simple point in the past.

2 = Simple past tense.
4 = Captures the aorist / continuing action of death in some way.
5 = Capturing the notion of an eternal act in a mythic realm rather than an act in the human realm, i.e. capturing the middle platonism of the original.

Romans 11:36 / Romans 12:2 (lack of concordance across chapter boundaries)
This is a tricky pair of verses because aion is frequently translated "world" or "age" depending on context. Normally bibles are concordant with aion within a single paragraph or idea because otherwise it converts Paul into speaking gibberish. But... this pair happens on a chapter boundary so translators often miss it. Of course chapter markers weren't added until centuries later so this split is part of our tradition not part of the original.

2 = Using world & age without treating this like a single thought.
4 = Using the same word.
5 = Doing something creative so it works in context.

1 Timothy 6:20 (de-historical ideology over accuracy). This verse is a great test because in it "Paul" makes reference to a 2nd century Christian book called the Antitheses, that the author of Timothy is hostile to. Generally conservative translations will try and obscure this issue so the verse makes no sense, because they don't want to undermine Pauline authorship. Liberal translators are quite often not any better. The word Antithesis means literally Oppositions, but in this case it is a proper noun. So a correct translation is something like: “O, Timothy, guard the precious deposit recoiling from profane and empty jabbering and the Antitheses (Oppositions or Contradictions in English) of the falsely labeled ‘gnosis’ for some who profess it have shot wide of the faith ”

2 = gibberish, meaningless comment like translating "opposition" lower case without any context.
4 = Right idea
5 = Antitheses capitalized or any explanation of what "Paul" (the author(s) of Timothy) is talking about here.

Romans 16:7 (Sexism over accuracy) This verse is often translated so as not to have a woman called an apostle even though unequivocally that's what Paul is doing. Here is a link to a meta article on BBB: http://englishbibles.blogspot.com/2006/11/junia-apostle-index.html )

2 = Cop-out, either making Junia male or dropping apostle
3 = Junia is an apostle but not highlighting Junia is a woman's name.
4 = Junia is a female apostle
5 = Discussion of this drawing attention and why there is resistance.

Galatians 5:6 (Protestant Orthodox corruption) this verse should be faith working through love. But quite often translators want to duck any hint of salvation through work and so change this to "faith expressing itself through love" so as not to offend. J.D. Kirk has a funny short article on this verse: Boo… Theologically Manipulated Translation. Boo…

2 = Non work
4 = Faith working through love

Mark 1:41 (proper footnoting) This is a simple verse where the textual information is split. The reading found in almost the entire NT ms tradition is σπλαγχνισθείς (splancnisqei", “moved with compassion”). Codex Bezae (D), {1358}, and a few Latin mss (a ff2 r1*) here read ὀργισθείς (ojrgisqei", “moved with anger”). It is more difficult to account for a change from “moved with compassion” to “moved with anger” than it is for a copyist to soften “moved with anger” to “moved with compassion,” making the decision quite difficult. Given a split original with experts cleanly divided on both sides:

2 = one side only
4 = both options

So what do you all think of the idea of objectively measure of accuracy? Do you like the list? Anything I should add or remove? Most importantly does this list meet the fairness criteria?

100 year predictions of the biblical landscape

2011-06-22T13:56:00.000-06:00

So I figured a fun topic is what will bibles look like in 100 years. I invite anyone who wants to crack out their crystal ball to give it a shot. Here are my predictions.

I think the idea that a bible should be “general purpose” will die in the next generation. This in my mind is a legacy of the KJV pre Living Bible / Good News Bible tradition where the same bible was used for liturgy, study, devotion. Translations will stop aiming to be all things to all people and instead will focus on a niche like most products do in America. The KJV may very well survive for “high liturgy” like funerals, being treated like Shakespeare or the Old Latin liturgy of the Catholic church. Study bibles, will no longer be based on liturgical bibles and thus can do the obvious thing of forking off both a literal and a dynamic translation marked up with notes. Thus they will be explicating the text using a dual strategy having a literal translation at least as much so as the NASB and possibly more like a good interlinear and a profoundly dynamic translation capturing the meaning of the Greek. The concern with preserving traditional phrasing will be gone since these bibles will be made exclusively for study. Churches will use liturgical bibles designed to be understood best when read out-loud, translation like the Voice and highly poetical bibles for liturgical functions. The pew bible will be one of these read out-loud bibles.

I think the fact that evangelicals, including the most conservative with the ESV, have adopted the UBS/NA text is a fundamental shift in their relationship with the bible. Evangelicals today read bibles with “some texts contain X while others say Y", or "while the majority of the Greek texts say X the Syriac / Latin says Y”, etc…. In other words a view of translation has emerged which says:

The actual originals are unknown, what you are reading is an estimate.
The act of compilation is active not passive
The act of translation induces inevitable distortion in meaning.

That’s not a small thing. Evangelicals are undergoing what liberals did in the mid 19th century, but while liberals were having to follow a trail blazed first by radicals Evangelicals will be following the trail blazed by large institutional mainline Christianity, a much wider trail. Evangelical Christianity is fundamentally (no pun intended) about the bible, the gospel and being born again. Evangelicals have always focused heavily on bible study, the popularity of study bibles today which is far beyond what it was a generation ago. With computerization the amount of information in the tools used for lay study is exploding. I think these 2 trends merge and the study bibles of 100 years are loaded with lower criticism and textual variants, made much simpler since study bibles will be computerized interfaces and not books.

On the liberal side, I think this adaption of lower criticism by the right is going to push them further to the left over the next 50 years. Liberal bibles today are still very conservative. I've written elsewhere on this blog how delightful it was to read a translation of John in Bultmann’s order. Given how easy it is for a computerized book to have multiple arrangements I think this transition, a switch to go back and forth will become common. And once it happens for John we might see arrangements in other books, like Corinthians with Schmithal's decomposition. For the Synoptic Gospels, given how well know Q and the documentary hypothesis is, I think we'll see the Q material clearly delineated and since Q is now such a common term possibly broken out further according to the internal structure of Q. So while conservative bibles will incorporate lower criticism, liberal bibles will incorporate higher criticism.

This shift left by the mainstream churches will force texts teams to begin to assemble more comprehensive documentary break downs, i.e. mainstream biblical scholarship / divinity schools to go in its natural direction towards where Religious Studies professors are today. So in terms of the UBS/NA40 (or whatever it is called) the Greek (and maybe even the Hebrew ) will present a tree view of the origins of the text (see Mack the Knife and biblical development). The books will show trees of descent, you will be able to track lines as they evolved in the 5th century from a host of sources. For example the UBS/NA Luke will clearly show what came from Ur-Lukas (Gospel of the Lord), which came from later Q additions or refinements from Matthew, which came from Mark and which came from reading the epistles back into the gospels.

As an aside, of course if divinity scholar have moved to where Religious Studies professors are today, its hard to know where these scholars will be 100 years from now. But if the last generation is any hint I imagine they will be reconstructing the sects that gave birth to Christianity and by then people will have a fairly thorough timeline of Christianity's parents, its birth and its childhood.

Getting back to bibles, I think the debate on the canon will be fiery in 100 years. In the last 15 years we’ve started to see several bibles that are arguing for changes to the canon. Today almost no evangelical believes that Hebrews is “Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews” and it is becoming acceptable to question the authorship of the Pastoral Epistles even within conservative circles. The counter evidence is just too strong, in the same way that evolution was absolutely rejected in 1850 and considered the norm in Evangelical circles in by 1980; I believe the political nature of the canon will be mainstream. So once 100 now the idea that the canon is essentially political in nature not religious is mainstream the big theological question will be how to respond. It took the first 200 years of the reformation for evangelicals to admit that the corrupt theology of the 16th century church really went all the way back to the 5th century and that revolution not reformation was the goal.

Today the fringe view that evangelical Christianity is free to construct their own canon rejecting the Catholic canon will be a well represented minority view. So put me down for Gospel of Thomas in at least one mainstream translation by then. The Jesus Seminar's 5 Gospels included it in 1996 and John Henson's Good as New which was directed at liberals in Great Britain included it in 2004 so this prediction, it wouldn't shock me if it were fulfilled by 2030, other bibles will have followed suit by 2070 though I believe in 2111 Evangelical bibles will retain their current canon. But the debate on canon once opened will be raging, and this change will open the door to other revisions, though I'm unsure what specifically people will want since today they consider the canon closed.

So feel free to comment on my 100 year predictions or go for it and give your own.

Sharper Iron on voting for excommunication

2011-06-21T01:37:00.000-06:00

A few weeks back Sharper Iron, an IFB blog, posted an article entitled Should Congregations Vote to Discipline? The details on the case are left very vague but the procedural problems were not. A highly respected member of the church, seen as an elder / leader was accused of a offense and under went the first 2 phases of Matthew 18, an individual confrontation and then 2-3 others confirming it. The case was brought before the pastor who found the evidence sufficient and the matter was brought before the congregation. They did not believe the evidence to be sufficient to warrant excommunication and voted to retain the leader. The pastor seeing this as a lack of trust decided to leave his position and found a church plant. Ted Bigelow wrote the article above criticizing the congregation for the apparent reason of engaging in a broader debate.

Normally I'd answer Pastor Bigelow at the blog he wrote the post on but Sharper Iron is a closed blog. I always like to notify people when I mention them here to give them a chance to respond. I won't be able to notify Sharper Iron, so if anyone reading this is a member please post in my name a notification in the interests of fairness. I'll try and notify Pastor Bigelow right after authoring this.

For Pastor Bigelow the structure of discipline is:
Step 1: Individual confrontation
Step 2: 2-3 others confront and determine if the evidence is true and certain, i.e. an inquest
Step 3: The 2-3 others go to church leadership to have their inquest confirmed
Step 4: Leadership informs the congregation to carry out discipline.

What he is arguing against is:
Step 4': The congregation votes on the excommunication via. evaluation of the evidence.

And he is absolutely correct that if the inquest is sufficient then this is a valid process. But this structure where the inquest occurs in Step 2, rather than Step 2 is evidence gathering and evidence evaluation occurs in Step 3 puts tremendous stain on the 2 or 3 others. Naive laity, often chosen for their closeness to the principles, without leadership oversight are being asked to conduct a full gathering of evidence. That's a lot to ask. And that's why typically Step 2 plays the role of an indictment and Step 3 is a full on trial, where evidence is gathered in both phases.

And in this case, the structural problems that Pastor Bigelow was arguing for became evident. The pastor of the church in question found the Step 2 evidence convincing even thought he accused was still pleading not guilty and when he advanced it to Step 4 the holes in analysis of evidence became evident. That is evidentially the congregation found the process wanting. It appears from the article that the congregation determined that the Step 3 verification of the evidence collected in Step 2 did not meet their standards and they thus rightly refused to carry out sentence. The pastor in this case was being rebuked for dereliction in his duty, during his Step 3 confirmation. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that rebuke, it sounds deserved. He probably should have asked the congregation for permission to return to a more formal Step 3 process rather than resign in a huff.

Pastor Bigelow focus in the article is arguing that evidence evaluation should not be occurring during Step 4, because the information is so detailed. And he is absolutely correct, the congregation should not be confronted with detailed conflicting evidence that they have to evaluate. Rather what they should be doing is evaluating the findings and process that occurred in Step 3. In other words, evaluating the trial.

And what it appears the trial consisted of was Pastor heard from the witnesses, decided the accused was lying and moved on. There is obviously not enough detail to evaluate the information provided in this anecdote, but what I see from the anecdote is the 4 step process working exactly as intended; in this case Step 4 preventing an abuse that occurred in Step 3. Which from the description provided sounds very much like the congregation doing their duty.

Pastor Bigelow's response, the rest of the article, is an apology for a policy that the 2 or 3 others can simply never be questioned because that is questioning their judgement, "But a careful reading of Matthew 18:17 shows that the church is not called to a higher authority—that is, to judge the person’s guilt or innocence. Instead, the Lord calls the church to submit to the prior judgment of the two or three witnesses since they have “established the evidence...The Lord Himself placed the determinative authority of church discipline in the judgment of the two or three. He tasks them, and not the church, with the responsibility to prove unrepentant sin in Matthew 18:16.”

The entire congregation is duty bound to fall in line excommunicate the accused based on a process they found wanting. Given this is a fundamentalist board, this involves secondary separation so the effect of the excommunication is not just cast out the member, but to cast anyone who dares associate with the member since such a person isn't recognizing their non Christian status. And that's assuming the congregation doesn't practice tertiary separation, i.e. separating from someone who refuses to separate from someone associated with the accused).

Given the extent of that penalty the evidence and process requirements should be simply staggering. The idea that 2 or 3 semi-random people should be empowered to conduct the investigation with essentially no meaningful oversight is beyond irresponsible. Matthew 18 outlines a 4 step process because the church carries the sentence and thus the church is going to be collectively held responsible for this judgement. They are the ones in weeks, years and possibly decades to come that will need to defend these finding, defend this evidence, defend this process. The Catholic church, centuries later is still called upon to defends its actions with respect to Galileo and Luther. A strong case for a discipline process where the entire congregation is not involved in the details can be made. But it is the duty of the church collectively to evaluate actions that can permanently damage the church, and excommunication is one of those actions. I did two case studies for people who would like examples of less famous cases than Luther or Galileo (Anne Le Fert, Gresham Machen); but the last 60 years of Fundamentalism I think work as an excellent as well.

I think there is a genuine lack of understand of the importance of excommunication. Once an excommunication happens the church is going to be asking others to join them in "calling for repentance" from an accused person who is going to deny the facts of the case; which means far from having to defend the facts to the congregation the church is quite likely going to have to defend the facts to world. He's being cast out of the congregation and being publicly identified as non-Christian by the Church. The church has to vote because the church is passing judgement.

I wrote a post a few years back on rules for due process. I think they make it clear how much leadership needs to be involved in an excommunication and how much "dotting the i's and crossing the t's is required". The bible establishes a standard that no evidence can be considered without multiple witnesses. It does not establish a standard that 2 to 3 people can bind the church and force it take action. Thankfully though the comment section at Sharper Iron mainly agrees that Pastor Bigelow's process is dangerous and unbiblical.

Now the reason I say there is confusion is when Pastor Bigelow then compounds the entire thing, arguing that anyone who expresses any disagreement with the 2 or 3 is themselves guilty of serious sin, "Sadly, men’s ways can get involved in these matters and really make a mess of things. For example, congregational voting in the case of an unrepentant member could create a serious breach of faith with Christ. What if a church decides to discipline out an impenitent member by vote, but some in the church vote not to remove him? Those who vote not to remove the unrepentant member have sinned against the Lord by establishing their own verdict of innocence that opposes what the Lord already ratified."

This seems to confuse excommunication with anathematization. Excommunication is to declare someone no longer publicly part of the church. Anathematization is to definitely declare that the person is damned. Protestants generally do not believe churches are capable of anathematizing someone which is why lines like "what the Lord already ratified" seems to indicate Pastor Bigelow believes his church is in fact anathematizing and not simply excommunicating. If he does comment here I think this is potentially the most interesting topic though it wasn't raised on Sharper Iron at all. I suspect because the people on Sharper Iron are protestants and so simply reading excommunication even when Pastor Bigelow uses language consistent with anathematization. (Here is a more detailed post on the distinction).

As far as I know Pastor Bigelow is not a national figure, he just happened to be posting an article to a heavily read website. So as much as possible I'd like to keep this away from the specifics of Grace Church of Hartford, unless he or an elder from Grace bring this up in the comments section.

Sco v. IBM, what happens to a political case

2011-02-26T18:06:00.053-05:00

The "save Amanda Knox" cause that has recently consumed this blog, is undergoing a shift. Initially the core group standing behind Amanda Knox were people who knew her. People who simply couldn't conceive of her being the sort of person Mignini described. People who paid their own airfare to testify in her trial. Then a small group of people examined the evidence and found it wanting. So while there was publicity, it was mostly directed in the early days by Mignini towards villifying Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito so as to generate false statements (see Amanda Knox and prosecutorial abuse for more on this). As the cause is broadening out to a few thousand people, its beginning to look more like a small political movement. Fewer and fewer people involved knew Amanda or any of the main parties involved personally.

So what we have here is a structure: a core group of people involved in the formal legal case, surrounded by a web support group who are gathering "evidence" in parallel with the actual trial, surrounded by a broader political movement. There are lots of criminal cases with the broader political movement. There are lots of political cases with a web based investigation but no broad political support. This triple is rare. And the best analogy is a civil suit that occurred recently SCO v. IBM that I was involved with in much the same way as this case. And the point of this post is to examine this earlier case for what is instructive about it.

SCO was a market leader in x86 (PC) based Unixes during the 1980s and 90s, and arguably along with Microsoft one of the few companies that believed there was money in the operating system's business as opposed to operating systems being a lost liter for selling hardware. As Linux came in they moved onto more of a legacy support role and eventually saw their value eroded, eventually being merging with a Unix company (see Caldera OpenLinux on wikipedia for more details).

The public controversy started when the SCO Group's CEO, Darl McBride, initiated a media campaign arguing that the Linux kernel contained "hundreds of lines" of code from SCO's version of UNIX, and that SCO would reveal the code to other companies under NDA in July. The Linux development process is public, and the kernel team has always been aggressive in attempting to ensure compliance with copyright law. The SCO code copyright violations, if they existed most likely were in the IPX module which had been funded by Caldera, the predecessor to the SCO group. And so this media campaign led to public outrage by a small group of people who were involved with Linux. But this outrage quickly moved onto the broader community of people involved in the Linux community. In much the same way that Mignini's media leaks to British and Italian tabloids originally offended just Amanda's family and friends but later generated the public interest in Seattle regarding Amanda Knox.

With a high level of public interest the initial filing in their lawsuit against IBM was heavily scrutinized. I was typical in noticing dozens of incorrect and false statement. I caught a lot of statements about the history of SCO, which I had been a fan of during the early 1990s, which were false. There were also provably false statements about the history of Linux. So in the discussions on the case I started raising these points. And this was nothing more than internet blather. What was different in this case, than so many others was I wasn't alone. Dozens of people were doing the same thing. And very quickly a site, Groklaw, was set up which organized this counter information. Playing much the same role as Injustice in Perugia and Friends of Amanda do for the Knox case. A central collection of information about the case as if the broader public had a vote.

Its hard to give examples on a general purpose blog since: most of the readers don't know what an operating system is, Linux / SCO has to do with operating systems kernels and the debates about things like IPX have to do with kernel libraries. So I'll pick an example, which while trite gives an example of how misleading and dishonest the entire filling was. Point 75, reads (points are mine)

The name "Linux" is commonly understood in the computing industry to be a combination of the word "UNIX" (referring to the UNIX operating system) and the name "Linus." The name "Linus" was taken from the person who introduced Linux to the computing world, Linux Torvalds.

Which of course is false in a whole bunch of ways. The name of the original programmer was Linus Torvalds, not Linux Torvalds. His name for the system was Freax which was a combination of Free, Freak and X. The name "Linix" (not a typo) was Ari Lemmke's abbreviation of "Linus' Minix". Ari ran the site where Linux was first uploaded and first distributed from. Minix was a reference to Andrew S. Tanenbaum Operating system he wrote as a companion to his standard text, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (link is to the late 1980s version, current is here).

And these details are important in context. The point of 75 was to argue that even the name Linux is evidence for their theory of the derivation of Linux While in reality the origin of the name shows the opposite. The reference to Minix shows that the early version of the code came from the educational / academic community and not the commercial community, product lines with the AT&T code. As an aside, the name Linux was a failed attempt at unifying the pronunciation using Linus name. American's were pronouncing Linix (Linn-ks) rather than 'Lee-nuks' (Len-uxs) and since Linus pronounces his name 'Lee-nus' the assumption was Linux would be pronounced that way; however Americans pronounce Linus as 'lye-nus' and Lye-nuks was the natural connection which also wasn't right and just added to the confusion.

So again while that point may sound nitpicky, and it is, this is meant to be an example that doesn't require background of how wrong SCO was on its many many points. And there were hundreds of these. All like the Harry Potter book, the blood on the knife, the bloody footprints... evidence that simply didn't exist. And just as guilters today in the Knox case encourage everyone to ignore the specific facts that virtually ever piece of evidence that is not irrelevant has been refuted, SCO's defenders encouraged the people hearing about these nonsensical claims to focus on the big picture. But of course the big picture was just an amalgamation of innuendo. But unlike in the Knox case the judiciary didn't feel it appropriate to create their own theories from SCO's claims, filling in the blanks with "it is possible and in fact probable". Rather they focused on the evidence as presented by the plaintiff:

Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the UNIX software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities.

The interest and controversy, fed by these sites continued to build. Journalists covering these sorts of things, typically rewrite a press release throw in a line or two of their own and move on after a few hours. For serious cases of course everything needs to be carefully fact checked, reputations can be made or lost based on how evidence was handled. And journalists soon found that this case was not going to be treated the same way as a minor lawsuit. The level of controversy and heat, was more like writing about the Israeli / Palestinian crisis or a major political case. There were expected to check and double check every line they wrote. Years later journalists faced criticism for what they had written in SCO v. IBM; and almost all who had done little more than regurgitate press releases had to write detailed apology / retractions admitting it, to maintain their credibility.

But journalists were not the only ones effected. The legal system itself was substantially influenced. They were people in IBM that originally been inclined to settle cheaply. The PR campaign and the community reaction to the SCO PR campaign put those ideas to rest. IBM knew the community reaction to anything short of total victory would be devastatingly negative publicity. Conversely the ongoing case was a net positive in terms of marketing, IBM's got to be the good guys among a large chunk of their potential customer base all for the cost of a minor lawsuit, SCO's PR campaign backfired. And again the analogy of Mignini's original vilification campaign leading to a dozen books and at least 3 movies works well in this analogy.

And as the case continued the people involved who were deposing themselves to assist IBM were not secondary players like myself but primaries. For example the project manager who had negotiated parts of the project Monterey contract for SCO with IBM came forward to contradict SCO's claims about what their intent had been at the time. The estate of John Lions, whom both sides knew had died of old age, came forward publicly to forward to contradict SCO's claims, and provide evidence to IBM about having gotten parts of Lions' Commentary on UNIX from AT&T that Lions hadn't. IBM's lawyers had the effect of an infinite investigative budget. Even SCO admitted how effective Groklaw was and tried to create a connection with IBM to put an end to their activities, which failed.

In terms of the Judges, most couldn't believe that this "BS lawsuit" was the case they were going to be famous for. None had experienced this level of public scrutiny where every motion was discussed publicly and in detail. It caused them to go more slowly and more carefully. It is my hope that the publicity for the Knox case similarly effects the Italian judges. The Italian judiciary is being attacked from the right within Italy, from the British with the EU it doesn't need to further alienate America where Italy has consistently taken the position that justice must meet international standards and shouldn't be a one country affair, (see Italy the EU and the international standards of justice).

Finally business partners and contributors to the lawsuit like like Yarro, Microsoft and Sun were affected. Negative PR for Linux had been a boon for Microsoft and Sun. Positive PR for SCO had been a boon for Yarro. But once this case became really hot everyone backed off. Microsoft while seen as unavoidably hostile to Linux needed to avoid being truly detested the way SCO was. SUN wanted credibility in the open source world. Conversely people on the other side like Novell and IBM who had often been mixed earned a lot street cred by being on the side of the angels. Perguia was shocked when Seattle rejected Perugia park. Rocco Girlanda has a US reputation now, and contacts with average Americans.

While the Knox case is not nearly as big as the SCO v. IBM case, I do think its an instructive example.

Amanda Knox: Murder On Trial In Italy

2011-02-05T01:51:00.003-05:00

Its been interesting the last day or two reading the comments about this movie with apparently both the innocentisti and the colpevolisti thinking the movie is going to harm their cause. I've been rather confident almost from the start on this one that's its going to be friendly to Amanda. I don't have any kind of insider information here but what I've seen so far has been very promising.

First, lets start with the director Robert Dornhelm. He did a bunch of light fare in the late 1970's and all of the 1980s. In 1989, in the last days of the Ceausescu regime, a childhood friend of his, Dominic Paraschiv was shot. The doctor misidentified him, falsely accused of being involved in a massacre. The doctor being a member of the anti-communists tied him to a bed, posted a guard to let him die from his gunshot wound. As evidence mounted that he had the wrong man, the doctor stood by his original theory rather than admit the mistake. As the story broke, the international media was still in a hope and glory phase with the overthrow and no one wanted to carry story about a stone cold murder due to judicial incompetence. Dornhelm wrote a movie in tribute to his friend, and does a fantastic job in showing the banality of a the state killing Parashiv and how the media and the society all conspired in acts they would later regret. The analogy Parachiv / Knox, Timisoara massacre / Kercher murder, Clara Weber (the journalist who proved Parachiv was innocent) / Edda Mellas, Romanian anti-Communists / Italian Police, Doctor who originally misidentified Parachiv and lets him die / Mignini, the International Press / International Press is crystal clear. I can't read his mind, but perhaps, hopefully, Dornhelm hopes to do for Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito what he was too late to do for Parachiv. I hope that Dornhelm sees that instead of another eulogy / tribute movie this time he will not let Mignini kill pull off his murder to cover his own mistake, this time he will get there before Parachiv dies.

But without question ater the death of Parachiv, Dornhelm is not the same man. The light comedies are gone. He makes the tribute movie to his friend. His very next movie is the story of Marina Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald's widow. That movie takes a conspiratorial view and is sympathetic to Oswald seeing Lee Harvey and Marina as pawns in a broader conspiracy. Over the next few years he does movies about Anne Frank, Spartacus; both victims of state violence, both tried and both guilty. He then does a movie about Michelle Brown. She was an early victim of identity theft. Her thief stole $50,000 in her name; she is accused and the authorities take a bad situation and make it worse. Eventually she becomes a leader in the credit protection acts but only after the US Senate acts, the police were none too helpful. I don't know Dornhelm's work too well, but I do not see a guy who is going to blithely assume that because the Italian police say something its true.

Next lets move onto Hayden Panettiere who has indicated she played Amanda as innocent. While she's not sure about the facts of the case herself and sees the facts as balanced, she is sure that Amanda Knox is no threat to society, never had malicious intent. She also doesn't believe Amanda got a fair trial (link to one interview). Marcia Gay Harden who plays Edda Mellas is appalled at the lies in the newspaper, what the prosecution leaked vs. what the actual case was (link to interview).

Further, Lifetime's brand is women getting screwed over by men. The natural villain for a Lifetime production, even knowing nothing else would be Mignini or Guede.

Its entirely possible I'm wrong. I've made some bad calls before from the crystal ball. And certainly I'd feel better if Candace Dempsey had written the screen play. But every indication I read is that the Guilters are fully justified in their freak out. I'm going to take the liberty to answer their string of questions they have raised.

Like Arline Kercher, Meredith’s mum, we wonder why only the name “Amanda Knox” appears in the title of the film when the victim is named Meredith Kercher. And finally, we wonder why, if Amanda Knox’s family and friends are unassociated with this project, as they claim to be, they are being given an hour of airtime directly following its scheduled showing? (Open letter on true justice protesting the movie)

As I mentioned in my earlier article on Amanda Knox and the Shadow they repeat the silly point that the movie should be named after Meredith Kercher, even though the movie is about Knox not Kercher. I addressed this bizarre notion that Knox is not a person in her own right but only a negative image of Kercher in my shadow article. But to use the analogy from Dornhelm in this article, his movie is called, Requiem for Dominic, its named after the man accused wrongly not after the 80 people who died in the Timisoara massacre.

"What possible justification could there ever be for inflicting this kind of pain on the real-life, grieving family of Meredith Kercher?" Saving the life of two kids for one thing. Preventing this sort of injustice from occurring again for another thing.

"Does it enhance our understanding of this heinous crime in any way? No, it does not." Of course it does. Most people who see this movie will know little if anything about the crime and will know far more about it after the movie.

Does it serve to dissuade others from engaging in such acts? Do you believe there are large numbers of people contemplating rape, torture, murders that need to be dissuaded from this course of action through a movie or two? What an odd question.

And then they close with this accusation about a bunch of people they know nothing about. On the contrary, it breeds the kind of callous disregard for human life and lack of empathy that led to this gratuitous act of violence in the first place and that apparently characterizes those who have produced, directed and otherwise participated in the project. The group of people who signed this letter, PMF, delights with open glee in acts of cruelty frequently complementing one another on their success in acting with callous disregard for others. But ignoring that. No one has any idea what led to this act of violence in the first place. It may have been a disregard for human life, it may been lust, it may have been greed, or any of dozens of possible motives. We just don't know that's part of the problem with the case never having been investigated properly.

But, what we do know is the people who produced this movie are good people. I may not think much of Hayden Panettiere as an actress, but as a human being far from callous she's been active in Save the Whales for years. Just to prove how absolutely not callous she is in this video you can see her break down in sobbing tears when she fails to save some dolphins:

You can also hear her being interviewed where she is excited about being arrested by the Japanese because it would give publicity to the cause. She's been active in other environmental causes. And Dornhelm, as I mentioned is someone who changed his life in response to a human tragedy. Marcia Gay Harden who we also mentioned is extremely active in the Red Cross, and is on the board of Hearts of Gold which helps New York's homeless especially homeless children. Valentina Carnelutti who plays Dr. Patrizia Stefanoni has done wonders in fighting against sexual abuse of children. So again we see that the accusers of Knox just make up facts about others.

What I see are more good people, standing up for the truth and holding a light into the darkness that the Migninis of this world wish to create.

Words from a murder, repentance vs. innocence

2011-02-02T09:29:00.002-05:00

A couple times I've used the Gary Gilmore analogy. I'm going to do it again by contrasting a pair of speeches, Amanda's statement in her appeal vs. Gary Gilmore's first letter to Nicole Baker after his arrest (written Aug 3, 1976). Both are the thoughts of people looking down the barrel of annihilation. For those who don't know, Gilmore will go on to be the first man executed after the reimposition of the death penalty. He's been arrested for 2 murders during the course of a robbery. Gary in Green, Amanda in Red italic.

Amanda asserts her innocence, while Gary is "repentant" in the way guilters would have liked her to be:

I look around the ugly vile cell and know that I truly belong in a place this dank and dirty, for where else should I be?

vs Raffaele and I are innocent, and we want to live our lives in freedom. We are not responsible for Meredith's death, and, I repeat, no justice is accomplished by taking our lives away.

Gary agrees he is a threat to society; Amanda asserts she has never been a threat:

I’m so used to bullshit and hostility, deceit and pettiness, evil and hatred. Those things are my natural habitat. They have shaped me. I look at the world through eyes that suspect, doubt, fear, hate, cheat, mock, are selfish and vain. vs. Ask them if I have ever been violent, aggressive or uncaring in front of the suffering that is part of the broken lives in prison. Because I assure you that I'm not like that. I assure you that I have never resembled the images painted by the prosecution. How could it be possible that I could be capable of achieving the kind of violence that Meredith suffered? How could it be possible that I could throw myself like that at the opportunity to hurt one of my friends? such a violence, as though it were more important and more natural than all my teaching, all my values, all my dreams and my whole life?

Amanda is often attacking for not being repentent. Gary Gilmore is quite repentent, he killed two people to speed up his ability to make payments for a truck. Amanda is sorry only that the whole thing happened:

Eat my heart out for the wondrous love you gave me that I threw away Monday nite because I was so spoiled and couldn’t immediately have a white pickup truck I wanted? vs.

The only thing I am really sorry about now is that there are people to whom I should turn, who are not here, but I hope my words will reach them, because I am either locked in prison, or I'm here. And...I'm here. To the family and dear ones of Meredith, I want to say that I'm so sorry that Meredith is not here any more. I can't know how you feel, but I too have little sisters, and the idea of their suffering and infinite loss terrifies me. It's incomprehensible, it's unacceptable, what you're going through, and what Meredith underwent. [Long pause] I'm sorry all this happened to you and that you'll never have her near you, where she should be. It's not just and never will be.

Finally look at how they responded to the murder. Gary identifies with the person going to gallows, Amanda bravely declares she is entitled to a normal life, that is all just an enormous error:

Remember I told you about The Oldness? And you told me how ugly it was - the oldness, the oldness. I can hear the tumbrel wheels creek. So fucking ugly and coming so close to me. When I was a child… I had a dream about being beheaded. But it was more than just a dream. More like a memory. It brought me right out of the bed. And it was sort of a turning point in my life… Recently it has begun to make a little sense. I owe a debt, from a long time ago. Nicole, this must depress you. I’ve never told anybody of this thing, except my mother the nite I had that nitemare and she came in to comfort me but we never spoke of it after that. And I started to tell you one nite and I told you quite a bit of it before it became plain to me that you didn’t want to hear it. There have been years when I haven’t even thought much of it at all and then something (a picture of a guillotine, a headmans block, or a broad ax, or even a rope) will bring it all back and for days it will seem I’m on the verge of knowing something very personal, something about myself. Something that somehow wasn’t completed and makes me different. Something I owe, I guess. Wish I knew. vs.

Because I felt an affinity towards her, suddenly, in her death, I recognized my own vulnerability. I clung above all to Raffaele, who was a source of reassurance, consolation, availability and love for me. I also trusted the authorities carrying out the investigation, because I wanted to help render justice for Meredith. It was another shock to find myself accused and arrested. I needed a lot of time to accept that reality, of being accused, and redefined unjustly. I was in prison, my photo was everywhere. Insidious, unjust, nasty gossip about my private life circulated about me. Living through this experience has been unacceptable for me. I have trusted above all to the hope that everything will be arranged as it should have been, and that this enormous error about me will be recognized, and that every day that I spend in a cell and in court is one day nearer to my liberty. This is my consolation, in the darkness, that lets me live without despairing, doing my best to continue my life as I always have, in contact with my dear friends and my family, dreaming about the future.

You can stop here, or read the full versions below:

August 3, 1976 from Gary Gilmore

Nothing in my experience, prepared me for the kind of honest open love you gave me. I’m so used to bullshit and hostility, deceit and pettiness, evil and hatred. Those things are my natural habitat. They have shaped me. I look at the world through eyes that suspect, doubt, fear, hate, cheat, mock, are selfish and vain. All things unacceptable, I see them as natural and have even come to accept them as such. I look around the ugly vile cell and know that I truly belong in a place this dank and dirty, for where else should I be? There’s water all over the floor from the fucking toilet that don’t flush right. The shower is filthy and the thin mattress they gave me is almost black, it’s so old. I have no pillow. There are dead cockroaches in the corners. At nite there are mosquitoes and the lite is very dim. I’m alone here with my thoughts and I can feel the oldness. Remember I told you about The Oldness? And you told me how ugly it was - the oldness, the oldness. I can hear the tumbrel wheels creek. So fucking ugly and coming so close to me. When I was a child… I had a dream about being beheaded. But it was more than just a dream. More like a memory. It brought me right out of the bed. And it was sort of a turning point in my life… Recently it has begun to make a little sense. I owe a debt, from a long time ago. Nicole, this must depress you. I’ve never told anybody of this thing, except my mother the nite I had that nitemare and she came in to comfort me but we never spoke of it after that. And I started to tell you one nite and I told you quite a bit of it before it became plain to me that you didn’t want to hear it. There have been years when I haven’t even thought much of it at all and then something (a picture of a guillotine, a headmans block, or a broad ax, or even a rope) will bring it all back and for days it will seem I’m on the verge of knowing something very personal, something about myself. Something that somehow wasn’t completed and makes me different. Something I owe, I guess. Wish I knew.

Once you asked me if I was the devil, remember? I’m not. The devil would be far more clever than I, would operate on a much larger scale and of course would feel no remorse. So I’m not Beelzebub. And I know the devil can’t feel love. But I might be further from God than I am from the devil. Which is not a good thing. It seems that I know evil more intimately than I know goodness and that’s not a good thing either. I want to get even, to be made even, whole, my debts paid (whatever it may take!) to have no blemish, no reason to feel guilt or fear. I hope this ain’t corny, but I’d like to stand in the sight of God. To know that I’m just and right and clean. When you’re this way you know it. And when you’re not, you know that too. It’s all inside of us, each of us - but I guess I ran from it and when I did try to approach it, I went about it wrong, became discouraged, bored, lazy, and finally unacceptable. But what do I do now? I don’t know. Hang myself?

I’ve thought about that for years, I may do that. Hope the state executes me? That’s more acceptable and easier than suicide. But they haven’t executed anybody here since 1963 (just about the last year for legal executions anywhere). What do I do, rot in prison? Growing old and bitter and eventually work this around in my mind to where it reads that I’m the one who’s getting fucked around, that I’m just an innocent victim of society’s bullshit? What do I do? Spend a life in prison searching for the God I’ve wanted to know for such a long time? Resume my painting? Write poetry? Play handball? Eat my heart out for the wondrous love you gave me that I threw away Monday nite because I was so spoiled and couldn’t immediately have a white pickup truck I wanted? What do I do? We always have a choice, don’t we?

I’m not asking you to answer these questions for me, Angel, please don’t think that I am. I have to make my own choice. But anything you want to comment on or suggest, or say, is always welcome.

God, I love you, Nicole.

Amanda's speech in court: (translated from Italian by PMF)

...It would happen sometimes that someone would propose a subject to discuss among us, everyone giving their opinion. I liked to followed these discussions but I was uncomfortable about whether I should participate directly, because I'm not talented for discussions. Often I don't succeed in expressing my convictions, at least verbally right at the moment. In fact, of all my friends, I'm the weakest for this. That's why, jokingly, my friend would usually jump on this, that my character was so peace-loving, and would challenge me with a little sentence: “Stand up for yourself Poindexter”, which means “Defend yourself, grind” [secchiona=someone who studies too hard, too serious]. It was a joke. And inevitably, either I would answer, but the answer coming out of my mouth would get all twisted incomprehensible...incomprehensibly around itself, or, I just didn't succeed in answering at all, because my mind would get blocked and my tongue would get all stuck. I couldn't do the thing that my friend often asked me to do, which was to defend myself. We have to imagine [Figuriamoci se io...not easy to render in English: maybe “You can imagine”] that I'm the weakest person in this room for expressing myself. That's why I ask for patience, because all this that I've prepared are the things that I didn't succeed in saying to you yet. Or better, I find myself in front of you for the second time, but these are the things that I would like to have said already. I ask you for patience because there have been opportunities to speak, but I was of few words. I believe that often words didn't come to me, because I never expected to find myself here, condemned for a crime I didn't do. In these three years, I've learned your language, and I've seen how the procedure goes, but I've never gotten used to this broken life. I still don't know how to face all this [3:00] if not just by being myself, who I've always been, in spite of the suffocating awkwardness. I was wrong to think that there are right or wrong places and moments to say important things. Important things have to be said, and that's all.

The only thing I am really sorry about now is that there are people to whom I should turn, who are not here, but I hope my words will reach them, because I am either locked in prison, or I'm here. And...I'm here. To the family and dear ones of Meredith, I want to say that I'm so sorry that Meredith is not here any more. I can't know how you feel, but I too have little sisters, and the idea of their suffering and infinite loss terrifies me. It's incomprehensible, it's unacceptable, what you're going through, and what Meredith underwent. [Long pause] I'm sorry all this happened to you and that you'll never have her near you, where she should be. It's not just and never will be. If you're not alone when you're thinking of her, because I'm thinking of you, I also remember Meredith, [5:00] and my heart bleeds for all of you. Meredith was kind, intelligent, nice and always available. She was the one who invited me to see Perugia, with her, as a friend. I'm grateful and honored to have been able to be in her company and to have been able to know her.

Patrick? I don't see you. But, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, because I didn't want to wrong you. I was very naïve and really not courageous, because I should have been able to endure the pressure that pushed me to hurt you. I didn't want to contribute to all that you suffered. You know what it means to have unjust accusations imposed on your skin. You didn't deserve what you went through. I hope you'll succeed in finding your peace.

Meredith's death was a terrible shock for me. She was my new friend, a reference point for me here in Perugia. But she was killed. [7:00] Because I felt an affinity towards her, suddenly, in her death, I recognized my own vulnerability. I clung above all to Raffaele, who was a source of reassurance, consolation, availability and love for me. I also trusted the authorities carrying out the investigation, because I wanted to help render justice for Meredith. It was another shock to find myself accused and arrested. I needed a lot of time to accept that reality, of being accused, and redefined unjustly. I was in prison, my photo was everywhere. Insidious, unjust, nasty gossip about my private life circulated about me. Living through this experience has been unacceptable for me. I have trusted above all to the hope that everything will be arranged as it should have been, and that this enormous error about me will be recognized, and that every day that I spend in a cell and in court is one day nearer to my liberty. This is my consolation, in the darkness, that lets me live without despairing, doing my best to continue my life as I always have, in contact with my dear friends and my family, dreaming about the future. [9:06]

Now, I am unjustly condemned, and more aware than ever of this hard and undeserved reality. I still hope for justice, and dream about a future. Even if this experience of three years weighs me down with anguish and fear, here I am, in front of you, more intimidated than ever, not because I'm afraid or could ever be afraid of the truth, but because I have already seen justice go wrong. The truth about me and Raffaele is not yet recognized, and we are paying with our lives for a crime that we did not commit. He and I deserve freedom, like everyone in this courtroom today. We don't deserve the three years that we already paid, and we certainly don't deserve more. I am innocent. Raffaele is innocent. We did not kill Meredith. [10:54] I beg you to truly consider that an enormous mistake has been made in regard to us. No justice is rendered to Meredith or her dear ones by taking our lives away and making us pay for something we didn't do. I am not the person that the prosecution says I am, not at all. According to them, I'm a dangerous, diabolical, jealous, uncaring and violent girl. Their hypotheses depend on this. But I've never been that girl. Never. The people who know me are witnesses of my personality. My past, I mean my real past, not the one talked about in the tabloids, proves that I've always been like this, like I really am, and if all this is not enough, I ask you, I invite you, I ask you to ask the people who have been guarding me for three years. Ask them if I have ever been violent, aggressive or uncaring in front of the suffering that is part of the broken lives in prison. Because I assure you that I'm not like that. I assure you that I have never resembled the images painted by the prosecution. [13:00] How could it be possible that I could be capable of achieving the kind of violence that Meredith suffered? How could it be possible that I could throw myself like that at the opportunity to hurt one of my friends? [?] such a violence, as though it were more important and more natural than all my teaching, all my values, all my dreams and my whole life? All this is not possible. That girl is not me. I am the girl that I have always shown myself to be and have always been. I repeat that I also am asking for justice. Raffaele and I are innocent, and we want to live our lives in freedom. We are not responsible for Meredith's death, and, I repeat, no justice is accomplished by taking our lives away. [Whispers: “okay”] Um, thank you

NET Bible upgrade

2011-02-01T08:56:00.000-05:00

The NET bible, which is my recommendation for all around best evangelical bible has just done a nice interface upgrade. If you haven't tried them yet or have and like them take a look at the new interface.

http://net.bible.org

JREF off topic

2011-01-31T09:54:00.001-05:00

This is an open thread for comments coming from the James Randi Forum's Amanda Knox discussion. Its purpose to allow off topic materials to float over somewhere.

Please link to a post in the related discussion, when you start a new topic, if you know how. Otherwise I'll try and do it.

_________

Senator Cantwell & Amanda Knox

2011-01-27T21:42:00.005-05:00

One of the people that the Friends of Meredith love to trash is Senator Maria Cantwell. The reason is that she has taken an incredibly strong stand for Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for a sitting US Senator. She's questioned not just the punishment, which is common but the verdict which is almost unheard of:

“I am saddened by the verdict and I have serious questions about the Italian justice system and whether anti-Americanism tainted this trial. The prosecution did not present enough evidence for an impartial jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. Knox was guilty. Italian jurors were not sequestered and were allowed to view highly negative news coverage about Ms. Knox. Other flaws in the Italian justice system on display in this case included the harsh treatment of Ms. Knox following her arrest; negligent handling of evidence by investigators; and pending charges of misconduct against one of the prosecutors stemming from another murder trial.

I am in contact with the U.S. Ambassador to Italy and have been since the time of Ms. Knox’s arrest. I will be conveying my concerns to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I have also been in touch with the Embassy of Italy in Washington, DC. (press release)

Now the argument made against her, is that she made that statement out of ignorance. That she didn't even know two Italians were convicted, hence her claims of anti-Americanism are ridiculous. But, if you clicked on the link to the press release you will see in her description, "Knox stood trial with co-defendant and former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito." So claims that "she didn't even know that Raffaele Sollecito, an Italian national, was convicted by that same jury" are obviously false.
TJMK demand more details and Senator Cantwell being the gracious person she is offered them:

Dear Professor Snape,

Thank you for contacting me with your thoughts regarding the Amanda Knox case. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

I have serious questions about whether Amanda Knox received a fair trial by an impartial jury. According to some news reports, Italian jurors were not sequestered and were allowed to view highly negative news coverage about Ms. Knox. Additionally, there may have been cross-contamination of evidence due to negligent handling by police investigators.

In this case, as in all cases where US citizens abroad face legal jeopardy, I believe that the U.S. Government should work to ensure that U.S. citizens are treated fairly, given adequate due process, and when appropriate, a fair trial by an impartial tribunal.

If Americans run into trouble while overseas, they should contact American Citizen Services at the nearest U.S. Embassy.

Thank you again for contacting me to share your thoughts on this matter. You may also be interested in signing up for periodic updates for Washington State residents. If you are interested in subscribing to this update, please visit my website at http://cantwell.senate.gov. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of further assistance. (link)

So of course like anyone else who dares speak up for Amanda she is subject to attacks. Peter Quennell in my debate with him regarding her, "The sitting senator (Cantwell) made a fool of herself, and it is a year since her staff shut her up. Hillary Clinton of course brushed her off. For one thing Italian-Americans in Congress are very ticked at the xenophobic attitudes toward Italy being shown. For another the State Department found NOTHING wrong with the process and the trial and anything in a bill would have the whole of Italy in an uproar. Besides there is NO sign the Italian judiciary can be leaned on. Go and ask a certain Mr Berlusconi."

Now lets talk about who Senator Cantwell really is. Is she a foolish woman being led around by her staff whom people casually brush off, or is that just a bunch of nonsense? Maria Cantwell got a degree in public administration and then went to work for the Alan Cranston's primary campaign in 1983. She got involved in local politics and was elected to the Washington House in 1986, had a successful legislative record. She was a sacrificial lamb candidate in a Republican district for the US House in 1992, except she won her seat. As a freshmen congressmen she took strong stands on electronic privacy, and changed national policy with regard to the clipper chip. She running in a Republican district, in a landslide year (1994) almost held her seat.

She left took over an executive position in RealNetworks and became instrumental in some of the very earliest streaming of sporting events ever done. She was an innovator in online music, balancing privacy with marketing, and we owe many of the compromises that have held for the last 15 years to her policies at Real. After leaving Real she used a substantial chunk of the money she had accumulated to fund a Senate campaign without having to accept any donations. She ran for the US Senate in 2000, won her seat and thus along with Senator Stabenow became the very first female candidate to beat an incumbent Senator. Since then she has served a decade in the Senate where she took the lead again on privacy issues, environmental issues (she chairs the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard ), alternative energy (she chairs the Subcommittee on Energy), and of course technology. In 2006 her opponent Mike McGavick was quite literally running from the Liberty Mutual Group, and one of the main reasons we have healthcare reform today was that she won that election and beat back, at least in this one instance the forces of political corruption.

This is a woman of substantial accomplishment. Amanda Knox is lucky to have such an outstanding Senator and I can't think of any reason her comments should not be treated with the seriousness of a statement by a United States Senator. There is simply no sign that Italian American politicians, like Nancy Pelosi, have anything but affection and camaraderie for Senator Cantwell. Her suggestion about impartial tribunals has been key to international trials for many years, and moving it down from trials of military/political figures to civilians strikes me as an excellent policy and one that is well considered. In short the attacks on Senator Cantwell are pure bunk.

____

See also:

Mack the Knife, and biblical development

2011-01-22T00:19:00.005-05:00

Mack and Jenny

So while I've been on the topic of murder I thought I'd get back to our regular scheduled programming with an analogy regarding the development of the books of the New Testament. The song Mack the knife has an interesting history:

One of the themes I've addressed regularly is how groups other than the proto-orthodox / proto-catholics produced earlier versions of many of the books of the NT. This often is a source of confusion and debate. So I thought I'd give an example from a song that underwent all sorts of diverse development and whose history his fully known. the song Mack the Knife. Here there is no dispute or missing links regarding the history. I have no doubt that Kevin Spacey sang the 2004 version. On the other hand the lyrics, music and style came from the 1959 Bobby Darin version.
Darin’s version picked up its score and lyrics from the 1956 Louis Armstrong version. Armstrong’s lyrics came from the 1954 Blitzstein translation from the German and the score from that came from 1928 Bertolt Brecht lyrics. To Brechts lyrics were originally Kurt Weill’s score, The Ballad of Mackie Messer, written for his wife Lotta Lenya (link to her singing it ). But Armstrong was familiar with the version as abridged by Ernie Kovacs, which had the dark cabaret feel (listen to original Brecht). Going back further the idea for the song came from Harald Paulsen (also in German), and he was modifying a folk tale that was based on a medieval German song whose origins are unknown.

So who wrote Mack the Knife? Clearly the “canonical” version is Darin’s but can I really talk about Bobby Darin as the author while he openly acknowledges his debt to Armstrong? Moreover, if I move fron just considering style and start asking questions about what the song means I need to look at the context, the 1928 Three Penny Opera. But that’s a modified version of the 1728 Beggar’s Opera. Most of the ideas for “Mack the Knife” come from Gay’s ballad opera, and there is a more primitive version of the song there. But that opera’s lyrics were based on Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope’s play in 1716.

Are those the original? Now imagine I asserted that God authored this song, based on historical events. Well the underlying historical events happened in the late 17th century and it was Pope and Swift who would have been inspired. Darin never claimed any sort of special inspiration but Mack the Knife stabilized in the 1950′s with his version. We have hundreds of records involving dozens or artists and million of copies of versions that agree on both lyrics, score from the 1950s and 60s. That doesn’t mean the two and a half centuries prior the song was stable. And this Darin stability ran in both directions with modern German versions show influence from Darin, for example this Dean Baxster, take.

There is no single author. The song evolved, from a variety influences. Earlier versions exist and give us insights. The modern Jazz, English language ballad has a culture but what gives the song its bite are the hints of the earlier cultures.

And this is precisely what is meant when evolution of various biblical books is discussed. For example Bultmann's theory how the legends formed into a saying gospel, the Signs Gospel, which became a proto-John, which evolved towards canonical John. Q and Mark form Ur-Lukas (proto-Luke in the diagram to the left), which migrate towards canonical Luke with Marcion's Luke (Gospel of the Lord) coming before or after. Similarly for Moses books, the first five books of the bible that have multiple strands with alternative theologies. When these notions come up think about how Mack the Knife evolved:
___

Variants on Mack the Knife:

A fun version from 1959 by Dinah Shore & Pearl Bailey showing how free the song became after Darin.
Marianne Faithful does a more traditional piano interpretation. This had no influence but is a delightful version.
Liberace, 1969 does Mack in 5 different styles on piano.
Czech version from 1961, stylized dancing girl version with an eastern european feel
Damia 1931 version which has a Parisian cabaret feel.

Darin / classical versions:

Kevin Spacy doing Darin's Mack the Knife
Ella Fitzgerald a nice smooth version which is well known.
Frank Sinatra 1989 where he acknowledges Darin / Armstrong influence.

windowserver.log, Raffaele Sollecito's alibi witness

2011-01-17T13:32:00.012-05:00

In the Massei report there is a ton of wild conjecture that passes for proven fact. In the section dealing with the computer forensics however we run into statements that are reproducibly falsifiable. That is Massei has findings of fact in his report which are not only contrary to literally thousands of pages of documentation published by Apple computer on how their operating systems work, but in fact can be falsified easily with every Macintosh computer sold in the last decade. This is the very height of exculpatory evidence, it is evidence that can be infinitely attested to. It is from an empiricist definition the very definition of a false statement. Now this attack on the computer forensics, may sound like me getting on a high horse and nitpicking. You might say something like "sure Massei is an arrogant buffoon for claiming as a matter of law that he understands OSX better than Apple computer, but he was deciding a murder case not a computer case" and you would be right. But the computer forensics came up for very good reasons. The false forensics were the means by which the police convinced Raffaele to give an alternate alibi to his original one. That is without the computer forensics there is no reason to suppose that Raffaele and Amanda were not in his apartment watching Amelie at 11:00 when the prosecution believes that Meredith Kercher was killed. They have an alibi again and we can go back to trying to decide this case on the facts on not on Mignini's hunch. Moreover, if Raffaele has his 11:00 PM alibi then the prosecution doesn't have to argue their own medical examiner botched the autopsy to get their theory of the timeline to match what they consider the key material evidence. Suddenly we are back to the murder happening at 9:00, Amanda and Raffaele being blocks away, and if they were involved at all only being involved in the clean up. So this is a very big deal. I'm going to do my best to try and make the debate between the prosecution and the defense on the computer forensics understandable, so you can follow as much of this as you can take and at least people have a reference they link off of. The actual documentation submitted is very difficult to read because, IMHO, whoever wrote the documentation is parroting things they heard rather than understanding what they are writing.

The core argument between the prosecution and the defense has been regarding the use of Encase which is a computer forensics tool. Encase was used to interact with Macs, running the OSX operating system on the POSIX level, the stuff common to every UNIX. So the prosecution did not look at anything which is OSX specific, for example the defense objected to the fact that the prosecution only examined the 3 types of timestamps used by POSIX vs. all 5 types of timestamps that OSX supports. The defense argues that there is evidence in some of the OSX files and flags showing signs of human activity, and that these signs are not present in the POSIX things that the prosecution examined. To give you an analogy If I were describing a book in Chinese I might have to talk about its color, its weight, the front cover illustration if there is one, the number of pages. That's a limited amount of information. While if I were talking about a book in English I could talk about its title, the description on the back or dust jacket, other books by the same author. And the defense's argument is that they have found evidence in that additional information proving human activity at the time of the murder.

Getting more specific the defense argues that there is exactly the kind of exculpatory evidence that could have been missed via. inappropriate methodologies in the windowserver.log file. Windowserver.log is part of OSX's NeXTSTEP heritage. On most POSIX systems the sorts of messages in the Windowserver.log file would have been caught at the X11 level, not by the windowserver and thus wouldn't have been logged. Since this is one of the key points in the appeal it is worth answering the questions:

What does the Mac's windowserver do?
What sorts of things does it log?

Take a quick peek at this diagram to the left. You can see basic I/O actions like typing on your keyboard or moving your mouse get dealt with at the lowest level by Kernel drivers these can also basic translations So user hold shift - a - release shift - n - g - e - l - space - f becomes user types "Angel f". Then the system needs context if the system is booting or in some sort of single user mode you don't want to send messages to a complicated GUI. The context determination is done by "Core Services". For hardware actions that are going to require interaction with end user applications, like spreadsheets, web browsers or games the message is passed through to the Windows Server. It then can handle the message itself, which is generally the case with mouse movements; or it can pass the message onto the correct application depending on where various things are on the screen, which is generally the case with keyboard input. Lets see an example of both. Microsoft Windows machines also have window servers and while things don't work quite the same, but close enough for this demonstation.

I want you to grab another window other than this web browser and move your mouse really quickly so that you keep covering and uncovering this line from various angles. Next I'd like you to reload this webpage and have the browser's rendering engine redraw everything. The first kind of redraw was fast. What happened was your window server saw the two windows were going to overlap, had already buffered what the applications wanted in their windows broke everything down into primitives and fed it to the your graphics card. When you changed your mouse direction the window server used the relative eternity of those hundredths of a second to repeat this process and the two windows passed smoothly. The second time we had the application actually redraw everything and let the window server know what was needed. Orders of magnitude slower.

So hopefully I've convinced you:

To be grateful to your window server for the years of eye strain it has saved you from suffering
Why the window server is a very credible witness to a human interaction with a computer. Exactly the sort of process that would know when Raffaele (or another user) was clicking his mouse or banging on his keyboard.

So you might think "perfect, we just ask the WindowServer what it was doing at the time of the murder and we either confirm or refute Raffaele's alibi". Oh if only it was that easy. WindowServer listened to your childhood coach about focusing on this play "keeping your head in the game". It is fast it lives unencumbered by the past, existing in a permanent now. Your obnoxiousness with the mouse and the two windows is forgotten. WindowServer itself is the perfect witness with an amazingly bad case of Alzheimer's. Oh but it does keep a log book a place where it writes down some important stuff, called windowserver.log.

I've highlighted where the Window Server sits on the OS side. This is just like our other picture but with more stuff on it, you still see hardware, kernel, core services, the window server, the application environments and the applications themselves. The point I wanted to make is where this plugs into on the OS side, the Quartz system, if you are a Mac user this is probably not your first time hearing about "Quartz" the part of the OS that handles graphics for applications and hopefully seeing Window Server in this context helps you make the mental shift to thinking of this from the application's perspective. If you start to think in terms of Quartz then you can think of this as the applications make calls to the Window server to draw, resize, hide, and move windows using Quartz graphics primitives. It also handles extraneous interactions like the screen passing over, from the previous example. What you would expect Quartz to do. If you haven't heard of Quartz don't worry about it, The main thing you need to understand is that it sits in the Quartz layer that most applications use to handle the screen. If you look directly above WindowServer, you'll see references to Carbon, Classic... the various applications environments.

Cocoa has the best support for Window Server so lets look at this from Cocoa's perspective rather than the Window Server's as we switch over to the logging.
I've highlighted the NSWindow binding which is where Window Server interactions will occur. You can see it is inside of NSResponder, which makes sense, this is how the system is going to pass events to you as an application that it believes you need to respond to. Conversely creating a Window needs to create a reference with Window Server so it can manage it....

It is this interaction between NSWindow as an abstract binding and WindowServer as an actual entity that will generate log. Anytime for example an application requests something impossible, like a window bigger than the screen it is on, if an applications reports that it has no idea what do with a message that was passed to it, etc... Window Server writes a short message in windowserver.log recording this failure and then "uses its judgement" about how to handle the problem. If you look at your own windowserver.log (if you are on a mac) you'll see that depending on your applications somewhere from every few seconds to every ten minutes something like this happens and a note is recorded. They may seem a bit cryptic but they are designed for the applications programmers to see where and when these times when windowserver had to guess occurred. Apple's documentation for the NSWindow class, discusses in detail what sorts of events specifically will generate log. For example in the section on setBackingType Apple indicates that if buffering is changed after initialization that will generate an error, a log entry in windowserver.log. I don't see any advantage in going another level deep but I hope the discussion above makes it clear what the connection is between NSWindow and Window Server, and why that documentation should be taken as authoritative on Cocoa applications generating windowserver.log entries.

For the other environments:

Carbon the default is to register windows and get messages more or less like the OS9 windowserver unless kOSAModeNeverInteract is set.
Java the interaction happens at the JRE level.
Quartz-wm: handles the interaction for X11 applications.
Quicktime has a lower level primitive that can peer with windowserver (this is complex)
Classic didn't run on Raffaele's computer so we can ignore.

And that's basically it. Most every application uses Quartz, Quartz uses Window Server to manager the windows, Window Server logs all errors or anytime an application doesn't know how to respond to but mostly when they make an invalid request. Common invalid requests are documented. That is the defense's theory and it is fully 100% supported by Apple. I leave it to you whether you consider Apple or Massei/Mignini more credible on what generates log. Needless to say everything in this post is reproducible and verifiable on any Apple computer running OSX.

_

Let me move away for teaching for a second, and do a pure editorial. I've never personally done forensics in a case involving violence; when I've done it has always been theft or fraud or mostly just trying to figure out and reverse the cause of corrupted data that is driving the investigation. That being said a programmer's laptop should be analyzed more like you would a server and less like you would a general end user's. Encase is fine for Amanda or Meredith's laptops had the prosecution not "accidentally" destroyed them. I don't think it is appropriate at all for Raffaele's. Since he was doing a computer science thesis he's a programmer it is going to require a skilled operator to do the investigation things are not going to in most obvious places or setup in the most obvious way and your typical forensic analysis will be wrong. For example the prosecution focuses heavily on cache data, and that is exactly the sort of thing you would typically check on an end user's laptop to look for activity. I agree with the prosecution's thinking. Most end users on a Mac would have their cache's in /Users/[Raf's username]/Library/Caches and /Library/Caches. But on Raf's machine I'd want to check places like /opt/local/var/cache (Apple's Darwinports default cache location), /sw/var/cache (Fink's default cache location) and he might even have a personal one like ~/caches. Encase won't check for those sorts of caches and thus the investigators won't find these in a cache's report. I agree with Raffaele's defense's intuitively, professionally, the examination the defense argues should have occurred, is exactly what I would have done were I investigating. I do consider this to have been a mistake.

Moreover, I'll say it is the sort of mistake that a forensic accountant / examiner is likely to make; so at least on this point I don't see evidence of an intent to mislead the court. I think the prosecution is innocently incorrect. I hate to take Mignini off the hook ever, but I don't see signs of the prosecution deliberately lying on this point.

There is one another bad news for the defense. Raffaele being a programmer cuts both ways. Because he programs we can assume he knows or can easily learn how to have programs generate events that look like interactions with hardware. He also knows how to change the windowserver.log file. Which means on his system we have to consider the contents of these files less definitive than they otherwise would be. I'd want to look at samples of his code from that time to get a grasp on whether the computer is telling me is likely to be true at worst or highly likely to be true at best. I would scratch definite however in either direction.